A lot of old-school programmers seem to feel the same about software. I've been reading the book "Coders at Work" recently and many of the older generation programmers reminisce about the days where they understood (and many times owned) every single line of code from the hardware up to their applications. Some say that they wouldn't like to be a programmer today because they'd have to accept too much as black-box (OS, frameworks, etc).
I can certainly sympathise with the OP and the older generation of programmers but I can't help feel that it's more a case of standing on the shoulders of giants. If we're to forever tinker (even if it is fun) with basic electronics or low level programming we'd have a hard time making any progress. As painful as it is I find it best to accept that something is black-box and just work with it, warts and all. Having said that, it's really useful to have the source code for the frameworks/libraries you're working with. Delving into it is similar in ways to the tinking the OP speaks about.
I think it is in some ways comparable to working in assembly versus a high level language.
In assembler you place every instruction, every part.
A high level language that gets compiled (or even compiled twice by a jit) outputs millions of instructions, many more than the largest hand coded assembler program.
Nobody in their right mind (or of a (in)sufficiently long lifespan) would even attempt to do such a thing manually.
Just like modern cpu designs could not be duplicated without a functioning computer make the masks.
So, 'old' programmers feel the same sense of being removed from the machine instructions and the complete knowledge as electronics people do from being removed from their components and visible, traceable wiring.
Not that long ago there was a posting here by a man who built his own computer, out of ttl logic circuitry from the ground up.
It's an excellent exercise in gaining control of the machine.
But as soon as you want to do something that is competitive in the marketplace then 99 out of 100 times you end up using that high level instruction grinder anyway.
Only guys like dark_shikari and people that are busy with smaller embedded systems get to enjoy that feeling on a daily basis. For everybody else that is just as alien as an electronics person that insists to build a complicated piece of equipment out of individual resistors, diodes and transistors.
When the first thin film circuitry appeared in the mid 70's (or at least, when I saw it for the first time, I must have been 10 or 11) the only thing other electronics hobbyists were wondering about was how they were going to repair them.
That's just as inconceivable to me today as it would be to perform surgery on in integrated circuit.
For those of you (like me) who suspect that one's programming education is incomplete without some taste of assembly language, the third edition of Jeff Duntemann's Assembly Language Step-by-Step is out now, focusing on Linux and NASM:
I can certainly sympathise with the OP and the older generation of programmers but I can't help feel that it's more a case of standing on the shoulders of giants. If we're to forever tinker (even if it is fun) with basic electronics or low level programming we'd have a hard time making any progress. As painful as it is I find it best to accept that something is black-box and just work with it, warts and all. Having said that, it's really useful to have the source code for the frameworks/libraries you're working with. Delving into it is similar in ways to the tinking the OP speaks about.