All the modern layers of 'glop' are designed to provide increased levels of abstraction making it quicker to develop applications. The real value in learning low level languages hinges on the realisation that any subsequent layers added on can't do anything outside the physical scope of the very finite set of instructions available. Once programmers get a handle on low level basics, it's a trivial matter switching between high level programming languages, it's all just variables, objects, arrays, lists &c. anyway. It would take a fairly lengthy amount of time to learn PHP and then try and apply your knowledge to COBOL if you weren't aware that basically (at some level of abstraction) all programming languages are the same and all you need do is familiarise yourself with the syntactical differences. So, yup, machine code is very relevant but not for the reasons he states.
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Nothing wrong with non-standard or ill-conceived technologies IMO, just as long as they're on the server side.
All the modern layers of 'glop' are designed to provide increased levels of abstraction making it quicker to develop applications. The real value in learning low level languages hinges on the realisation that any subsequent layers added on can't do anything outside the physical scope of the very finite set of instructions available. Once programmers get a handle on low level basics, it's a trivial matter switching between high level programming languages, it's all just variables, objects, arrays, lists &c. anyway. It would take a fairly lengthy amount of time to learn PHP and then try and apply your knowledge to COBOL if you weren't aware that basically (at some level of abstraction) all programming languages are the same and all you need do is familiarise yourself with the syntactical differences. So, yup, machine code is very relevant but not for the reasons he states.