> ...ask a musician if they are really in the weeds of why the instrument is producing music (the physics behind it!). They are probably aware that it's vibrating air, but, in general, they won't know the theory behind it.
A big difference is that, unlike computing, their instrument probably won't stop working because of some subtle change to physics introduced by a seemingly-unrelated change made to the universe by some other party in the musical instrument / air / molecules / atoms / quarks "stack". Theirs is a world with some assurance of stability.
Ours is a field built upon shifting sands. Knowing what the foundations are that the edifice you've constructed sits upon allows you to affect repairs when it crumbles unexpectedly.
> Knowing what the foundations are that the edifice you've constructed sits upon allows you to affect repairs when it crumbles unexpectedly.
Finally get to use this bit of knowledge: 'effect' (the verb) was the word you wanted there.
> Less than a minute later, the mysterious account responded with an answer — 1938 — and a decades-old edition of the Congressional Record to prove it.
It's not so much that he knows procedures well, it appears that he has some sort of didactic memory that he has focused on this topic. He would have had to basically already memorized this fact obscure enough that a congressional scholar was tweeting for an answer.