> Do you expect that everyone who uses a database should know all the internals of the data structures stored on disk, journals, ram cache, etc. before they try to do basic SQL?

Honestly? Yes. Knowing the basic data structures stored on disk helps you understand why having an index is important, and just creating tables and doing queries on them is going to lead to extremely slow queries. Understanding journals helps you understand transaction isolation levels, which helps you understand why you can’t just have N web workers all doing write queries at the same time and they don’t necessarily see each other’s writes right away if they haven’t committed a transaction. RAM cache helps you understand why journaling is important in the first place if the database crashes.

I absolutely do believe that anyone who calls themselves a professional should be armed with such understanding before they go writing SQL code in a production context. Playing with it as a toy in your spare time? Go nuts, learn in any order you want. But if you’re writing code for an app that we’re shipping to users and that your coworkers’ livelihood depends on, you should get the friggin’ basics down.

> It’s laughable to me that people have this impression. It’s extremely rare to find a developer who has any knowledge at all on how to do basic computer things like installing an operating system, troubleshooting a network, understanding DNS, or being able to do anything outside of their programming environment.

I agree with you, but I would frame this as a lament. It really fucking sucks that my coworkers sometimes show now desire whatsoever to understand why their code doesn’t work on a machine with IPv6 enabled. Or don’t bother to care about why their ABI-breaking change caused missing symbol errors when downstream clients tried to run against the new build. You want my opinion? These people should leave the industry, and we’d be better off.