Yes. Yes, I do. And it makes a tremendous difference.
Abstractions are an absolute necessity without which we could never have built a computer. And may be fine to stay at one level of abstraction for day to day stuff. Knowing the levels below and above however makes it possible to not only use the current one better but to also to navigate the hierarchy and use the best abstraction for a specific task. And design new ones if necessary.
Our CS courses provided exactly this: We looked at single transistors, programmed microchips, implemented a CPU on a FPGA, toyed with kernels and drivers, walked trough the OSI-layers, wrote a compiler, a static code analyzer, used monads and the lambda calculus, learned about turing machines and different computing architecures, abstractions, models and beyond.
Abstractions are an absolute necessity without which we could never have built a computer. And may be fine to stay at one level of abstraction for day to day stuff. Knowing the levels below and above however makes it possible to not only use the current one better but to also to navigate the hierarchy and use the best abstraction for a specific task. And design new ones if necessary.
Our CS courses provided exactly this: We looked at single transistors, programmed microchips, implemented a CPU on a FPGA, toyed with kernels and drivers, walked trough the OSI-layers, wrote a compiler, a static code analyzer, used monads and the lambda calculus, learned about turing machines and different computing architecures, abstractions, models and beyond.
It really helps to have the 'whole' picture.