You are everything that makes people conflate enthusiasm for low level knowledge with gatekeeping.

This is honestly getting worse than gatekeeping, entering the realm of illusions of grandeur.

I actually can't reply directly anymore because everything I'm posting is being downvoted to hell, but it's fine, I know implying the unwashed masses blindly cutting and pasting SO answers are doing just fine for themselves is taboo in a place where people feel programmers should be taking PE certification exams

but anyways, here's my response:

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> Now compare your experience to that of the hypothetical stockbroker who's diving into React native app programming without even really understanding what a loop is. He has decades to go before he understands what he's doing! What's NPM? What's a text editor? Is that different than a word processor? I screwed up my initial install... how can I start over? Insisting that programming is really easy and it's gatekeepers adding requirements that make it hard isn't doing him any favors; he's going to feel like a complete failure.

> _he's going to feel like a complete failure._

Why? You're casting this accusation on this hypothetical stock broker. Why are they going to feel like a complete failure?

How is this hypothetical stock broker any different than I was literally hitting random buttons in the programming menu of his father's calculator until he made some text appear?

> you started from the bottom/most concrete layer of abstraction

No, I didn't. I started from BASIC, I only learned C because assembler looked like greek and I heard you needed assembler if you wanted those fancy graphics all the best calculator games had and I learned that C let you write assembler somehow without writing assembler.

If I had quit because I didn't understand half of what I was doing (I didn't) I wouldn't be a programmer today.

I didn't feel like shit, I felt like a kid who had just found a candy shop, what great things were there for me to learn next?

Sure I had doubts, but they were easily drowned out by any modicum of progress I made, and soon enough I learned that it's ok because _no one_ knows all the fundamentals.

Out there there's someone who's scoffing at this talk of "knowing assembler lets you know how computers work", they're ready to bust out explanations of instruction pipelining, speculative execution (for now),
how memory controllers work, what the micro controller in your HDD and SDD is doing to let your assembler do any kind of useful IO without understanding how underlying media works.

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And also, if the stock broker quits because they don't understand what they're doing, in what universe is telling them:

"Actually go and learn this other stuff, that's the fundamentals. Just realize has a much much MUCH longer feedback loop, there's orders of magnitude more surface area before you get back to the level you were working on and can produce something that you recognize as being on the path of making the app you wanted"

Going to get them to _not quit even faster_.

In my experience the best way to get people feeling empowered is to let them make something that they can envision being on the path to what they want to make.

Writing a hello world in assembler and having it show up in a command prompt is not going to get my stockbroker friend nearly as happy as writing a hello world in React and running it on his phone, because he sees a glimmer of how the latter gets him to his goal of an app.

You're ascribing individual behavior to a broad set of people because they don't agree with your approach to learning being in their best interests. That's what I have such a problem with.

Who cares if they don't know what NPM is, who cares if every time he screws up he opens App Copy (23) and deletes the current one.

If they're going to quit because they don't know what NPM is or what a text editor vs word processor, how is sitting them down and trying to get them to understand assembler going to ease their anxiety?

And if you feel that's hyperbole, even getting them to understand NPM past copy and pasting commands. You'd be amazed at the things people have built that help real human beings do useful things every day while never truly understanding how NPM works.

There's nothing wrong with embracing people having no idea what they're doing just running at the wall until it starts to stick. It's what I did, and I couldn't have done it any other way.