> VMs, and VM-based languages, are applications that run on top of all that kernel programming. I'm guessing the vast majority of all modern programming is don

> VMs, and VM-based languages, are applications that run on top of all that kernel programming. I'm guessing the vast majority of all modern programming is done using VMs: Python, Java, C#, Lua^, JavaScript^, etc. Basically, if your language uses a runtime, it's likely using a documented or undocumented bytecode and VM. They're pretty important to understand. > You seem to be arguing that anyone who does web or VM dev doesn't really need to know what happens inside a computer. That's not my argument. I highly recommend new programmers to understand as much of machine architecture as reasonable. I'm just arguing that there's no place for a systems programmer to be so dismissive toward a web programmer because he/she doesn't know his part of the stack as well as he does. There is always going to be a gap in knowledge about low-level programming between these two specializations. That gap is no reflection on the intelligence or competence of the higher-level programmer. In this particular case, I believe that Julie has only been programming for a few years. If that's the case, and assuming she only retains a fraction of what she writes about, she's further along than most of us were at that point (me included). Just because many of us bluff and bluster our way through interactions with our peers, and Julie is up-front about her state of knowledge, doesn't mean that she's an inferior programmer (at all). I suspect her honest curiosity will carry her along to the top of our profession in due time. So if the parent had written something like, "it's so important for new programmers to work on this type of material, and it's heartening to see these kinds of blog posts from younger programmers", then I would have applauded. That also would have been more in line with the HN guidelines ("avoid gratuitous negativity"), rather than the approach that was actually taken. ^ If you want to advance the "Lua, Python, and JS" aren't VMs, but rather interpreters, you'll need to convince the likes of Mike Pall and Lars Bak that they're not working on a VM (both have explicitly referred to their creations as "VMs").