The newbie's statement sounds like a romantic platitude.
You should've shown the newbie programmer that programming is the art of abstraction and that there was never a pre-modern era where "we" were all toiling away with omniscient domain knowledge.
We lean on other people's abstractions because we're mortal and the things we decide to abstract have a surface area that overwhelms the problem we're trying to solve.
Rather than being poorer for it, we're immensely enriched with the ability to solve the problems of our domain with the same vernacular that expresses our problems. Total providence.
You should've shown the newbie programmer that programming is the art of abstraction and that there was never a pre-modern era where "we" were all toiling away with omniscient domain knowledge.
We lean on other people's abstractions because we're mortal and the things we decide to abstract have a surface area that overwhelms the problem we're trying to solve.
Rather than being poorer for it, we're immensely enriched with the ability to solve the problems of our domain with the same vernacular that expresses our problems. Total providence.