This morning I was reading this post, the author links Jeff Atwood blog and the post speaks about that some thing that are important to know to be a good developer, one of the controversial part is
Know how long it takes your computer to execute an instruction, fetch a word from memory (with and without a cache miss), read consecutive words from disk, and seek to a new location on disk
I learned these stuff long time ago, since I studied Electronics, so I work with FPGA, build digital processor in VHDL, and I really like those low level stuff. The problem is that in 2008, the industries, requires other skills, that are more important respect the low level stuff. If I look in the past, this kind of knowledge did not help me in real programs committed me by some stakeholder, they helped me a lot when I had fun programming PS2, but this is another story.
Surely low level knowledge is not required to be a good developer, but it can help. With C#, Visual Basic, and generally in .NEt world, developers usually works at higher level, and they does not worry about “reading consecutive words from disk” or how long does it takes to “fetch a word from memory”, but a general understanding of these concepts really helps to be a better developer. Knowing that working on the same set of variable could improve performance because good locality avoids to gets words from main memory because they are in cache could help. If you completely ignore these concepts you can be seriously hurt by poor performance only because “Hey, there is the garbage collector that does everything”.
Surely that are other stuffs that really helps a lot more:knowing OO principles, pattern, algorithm, SQL etc. It worth nothing to know the cost of a cache miss if you really does not know the concepts of Indexes in a Database…. But in the end, my opinion is that every notion can be useful, even low level stuff, because as Peter Norvig Says
Remember that there is a “computer” in “computer science”
We can speak about pattern, ORM, or some strange and esoteric stuff, but in the end, all goes to be a bunch of electrons that pass through the gate of a MOSFET, and some magnetized piece of metal where we store informations 
Alk.
Tags: Programming
August 6th, 2008 at 3:40 am
hi there
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I follow your blog and its a bit of a pain because I can only see snippets (about a paragraph of the post) this in the end means that i end up not reading the whole thing most times, do you think you can change this?
Cheers
Andrea
August 9th, 2008 at 3:12 am
Do you mean that there are too long snippets? If you like you can email me some suggestion, I’ll appreciate them very much.
Alk.
August 9th, 2008 at 6:10 am
Hi Alk,
the problem is that reading your feed in an aggregator only an abstract of the post is displyed and the reader is forced to open the browser to read the full article… and it’s a pain
.m
August 10th, 2008 at 2:25 am
Ok, I can configure wordpress to include the whole article in the feed, but since I use a code formatter, when I insert a snippet in the article, the feed does not apply format, and the snippet itself is not readable
A possible solution is to use images instead of snippet, but this does not permits cut and paste.
I’ll investigate a viable solution, maybe creating two different feeds.
Alk.