The Danger of Understanding How Things Work
When I was 16 years old, I started programming on a Commodore 64; I was learning MOS 6510 machine code, interrupt programming and all kinds of crazy low level stuff. In the process I learned a lot of things about how operating systems work - too much for my own good. For 25 years, these learnings has hunted me, because they ruined my abilities to think in many ways. Because I actually understand what is going on one level down, it is difficult to abstract from that knowledge. It seems that because I know the computer is organized in the way it is, I tend to also think that way. When I think of a problem that I need to solve, I tend to jump straight to thinking how is this possible in terms of what I want the computer to ultimately do to solve this. Whereas this kind of thinking can be good from a performance point of view - and I have used this knowledge to that purpose at many occasions - it ruins the resulting program in terms of understandability and maintainability.
