I think I agree that yacc wasn't a great example for my purposes, but hang on. My point isn't that learning specific technologies isn't valuable, it's just that it is... specific. Even something as general as graph traversal is still not as ubiquitous as lines and pages of code. There may be more generalizable knowledge in learning yacc than there is in learning the Ruy Lopez, but either way, it's not as general as tactics.
Your fourth paragraph is a bit alarming to me, because I agree completely, and I hate to think that I wrote the opposite. I am most emphatically NOT trying to suggest that abstract knowledge is more valuable than practical work. What I do suggest is that being able to reason about code in general is more valuable than expertise with any one specific technology. Consider two coders who have both written AST generators with yacc: can they talk about the low-level, tactical design decisions they made in their code, and the implications of those decisions, and alternatives that they considered?
I think I agree that yacc wasn't a great example for my purposes, but hang on. My point isn't that learning specific technologies isn't valuable, it's just that it is... specific. Even something as general as graph traversal is still not as ubiquitous as lines and pages of code. There may be more generalizable knowledge in learning yacc than there is in learning the Ruy Lopez, but either way, it's not as general as tactics.
Your fourth paragraph is a bit alarming to me, because I agree completely, and I hate to think that I wrote the opposite. I am most emphatically NOT trying to suggest that abstract knowledge is more valuable than practical work. What I do suggest is that being able to reason about code in general is more valuable than expertise with any one specific technology. Consider two coders who have both written AST generators with yacc: can they talk about the low-level, tactical design decisions they made in their code, and the implications of those decisions, and alternatives that they considered?
Thanks again.