3 and 4 are only needed in specific domains. 1 and 2 you won't need every day. You can probably even make a career out of software not knowing them. But every

3 and 4 are only needed in specific domains. 1 and 2 you won't need every day. You can probably even make a career out of software not knowing them. But every software related domain will have times where knowing them will help you, and where not knowing them risks an inefficient and slow implementation and no way for you, individually, to fix it in any sort of reasonable time; you'll either have to learn it then, or you'll be reliant on someone who does know it fixing it for you. I've had to address performance issues where knowledge of common data structures and algorithms' time and space complexity (and/or being able to look at an algorithm and realize "...this is O(n^2). It only needs to be O(n). WTF", and fixing it) was the key in Javascript, Erlang, Python, and Java. Exactly what 'high level language' do you feel you won't eventually need this stuff in?