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Doing "whatever it takes to make it work" creates profoundly different results as opposed to "learning how things work".

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This is so true. I did an apprenticeship as software engineer (but already coded for 3 years before that). In my whole class at vocational school there was not a single person who was genuinely interested in e.g. the data structures they were using.

Most people used java.util.ArrayList all the time but they couldn't answer why nor did they want to know why a LinkedList, Map, Tree etc. would be better for a specific case. While it is nice to have all those high level types and classes available it's kind of sad that most people aren't interested in the inner workings.

Edit: The various Java collection implementations aren't really "low level" either, but you get the idea.

Pity they used ArrayList, it is kinda a shitty data type for a lot of use cases. I would say that something like the Lua "map" (essentially, a resizing associative array with some optimization to make array-like access efficient) is more optimal as a "use this for everything" data type, due to greater versatility.

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