Certain debates are timeless. I think that in my children's time there will be programmers and that some of those programmers will be unable to understand what their tools abstract away.

Wouldn't that be considered progress?

Most programmers today don't really understand how a compiler/interpreter works, how to write assembler, how to allocate/free memory, or even a solid understanding of data structures yet work somehow gets done.

My friend, I am going to have to let you go on this one. That's another, fine debate that has carried on since the invention of the first compiler, and continues today with people firmly on both sides of the fence.

I personally think that an abstraction is useful when it helps me to focus on the essentials of completing a task and allows me to ignore the irrelevant, but allowing me to ignore it today doesn't mean I need never understand it.

As an example, I was the development manager for a tool called JProbe. One of its fine tools was useful for identifying memory leaks in Java programs. We had a devil of a time explaining to people what a memory leak was and how a Java program could have a memory leak despite not having any of those complicated pointer thingummies.

To a great extend, Java's memory manager provided value by allowing a programmer to think about other things most of the time. You be the judge of whether Java programmers ought to know how memory works and what a reference is, and the difference between a strong and a weak reference, and how it is that a program with no pointers can have a memory leak.

Why did you stop there? Why not continue with the things that those things abstract away, ad infinitum?