Sometimes you don't need something as complex as existing commercial solutions.
But you are correctly repeating the standard wisdom of the day, which is that first-principles understanding is inefficient (because people don't have time for it) and the best thing is to treat software as pluggable units.
I mean is the standard wisdom wrong? The standard wisdom is right.
The way I see it is this. Sicp is good to know. But as an introduction to programming python and applications are more relevant to the modern age.
>As far as I know, engineers still learn physics.
So? Human society is overwhelmingly made up of specialists. Engineers who learn physics doesn't change the fact that within engineering, there are specialties.
The standard wisdom tends to keep the bureaucratic beast in control, not you. That is why it is the standard wisdom, and not the outsider minority opinion. That is why increasing your professional competence, year over year, with SICP and similar courses of study, is anathema to any engineering culture that has been totally taken over by bureaucracy, which is a majority. That is why there is a consulting industry serving Uncle Bob's ideas that comp-sci is not actively harmful to know about but certainly not something you need to be encouraged to learn. According to this school, anyone making a claim that "every programmer should study X" would make their co-workers uncomfortable, and this is the kind of toxicity that must be managed out of a modern (that is, bureaucratically-controlled) company.
The standard wisdom is not for you if you want to look back on your career and say that you did meaningful work, that you tried to advance your field, even if you failed, or that you worked on one of the hard problems of your time. If you want to look back and say that you navigated FAANG and retired early, then the standard wisdom and making yourself amenable to the super-organism may be just the ticket.
SICP, by the way, isn't something good to know, because it's not something you know. It's something you do, and the experience (all the exercises) will rewire your brain, unless you've already had sufficient experience so that those patterns are already wired in, in which case you may find it kind of trivial and beginner-ish. The difference is whether you're oriented towards things like writing compilers as scary and best left to specialists, or whether you regard them as basic tools of any programmer, which is more empowering for you, not for the bureaucracy, which diminishes in purpose as individual variance in competence grows.
The point about engineering is that there's no movement saying that engineers should stop studying physics, and consume physics knowledge in special packets prepared for the use of the "engineering industry" by physicists. Yet this absolutely fantastical idea is how the work done by computer scientists is supposed to be distributed to software engineers. They need not study the fundamentals, because they need not understand them, just consume the artifacts produced by those who do. Most of the low standards of modern software can be traced directly to this attitude.
>The point about engineering is that there's no movement saying that engineers should stop studying physics, and consume physics knowledge in special packets prepared for the use of the "engineering industry" by physicists. Yet this absolutely fantastical idea is how the work done by computer scientists is supposed to be distributed to software engineers. They need not study the fundamentals, because they need not understand them, just consume the artifacts produced by those who do. Most of the low standards of modern software can be traced directly to this attitude.
Do whatever you want. Nobody is stopping people from studying multiple fields. The main point is that the human brain has limitations. In general the majority of people can master only a few specialties. This is the MAIN reason behind the "standard wisdom".
> As far as I know, engineers still learn physics.
That's interesting, do they learn about all the properties of newly discovered quarks and derive Newtonian physics from quantum theories? Because if that's what they do, it's new to me.
I believe engineering majors at any prestigious institution will be up to date on every one of the currently-known quarks, yes. If your point is that it's not the same as a physics major, that's also true.
But you are correctly repeating the standard wisdom of the day, which is that first-principles understanding is inefficient (because people don't have time for it) and the best thing is to treat software as pluggable units.
> All forms of engineering work this way.
As far as I know, engineers still learn physics.