I have been a computer-fanatic for almost a decade now. I've always loved and wondered how computers work, even from the purest, lowest hardware level to the very smallest pixel on the screen, and all the software around that.

That seems to be my problem though ... as I try to write code (I'm pretty fluent at C++) I always sit there enormous amounts of time in front of a text-editor wondering how every line, statement, datum, function, etc. will correspond to every Assembly and machine instruction performed to do absolutely everything necessary for the kernel to allocate memory to run my compiled program, and all of the other hardware being used as well.

For example ... I would write cout << "Before memory changed" << endl; and run the debugger to get the Assembly for this, and then try and reverse disassemble the Assembly to machine code based on my ISA, and then research every .dll, library file, linked library, linking process, linker source code of the program, the make file, the kernel I'm using's steps of processing this compilation, the hardware's part aside from the processor (e.g. video card, sound card, chipset, cache latency, byte-sized registers, calling convention use, DDR3 RAM and disk drive, filesystem functioning and so many other things).

Am I going about programming wrong? I mean I feel I should know everything that goes on underneath English syntax on a computer program.

But the problem is that the more I research every little thing the less I actually accomplish at all. I can never finish anything because of this mentality, yet I feel compelled to know everything... what should I do?