Functional knowledge mandatory for an abaper

Question

Dear Experts,
                    I have one doubt .I would like to know how much functional knowledge is required for an abaper. I am a beginner.
How to become a good abaper.

Answer 1

The more business and functional knowledge a developer has, the better he'll be able to apply his development skills. Though I'd rather have a developer with little business knowledge who's really good a programming, than a business monster who doesn't know what encapsulation is.  Sadly, especially since the idea that technical skills are a commodity, what you end up with is "developers" who have no understanding of program design and no business understanding either. And dreadfully written programs, which are intially produced very cheaply but are enormously expensive to maintain or enhance. But that's ok, because maintainance and enhancement is an operational cost, not a project cost.
The split between functional/technical is in my mind rather artificial. I've been working in IT for a long time. When I started we had analyst programmers. We used to go talk to the business, find out their needs, then go a write the software. My suspicion is that the large consultancies didn't like the technical side of IT, as there you have to produce concrete results. So they came up with the idea of the functional/technical split. This also helped in other ways, because they could then take on "IT" people with no technical knowledge at all, which are certainly a lot easier to find.
...here endeth the rant...