4 ms·
> not knowing that suggests a severe lack of fundamentals and hints at trouble on the horizon Exactly this. Strictly speaking you really don't need to know how
by popcorncowboy 4y ago
> not knowing that suggests a severe lack of fundamentals and hints at trouble on the horizon
Exactly this. Strictly speaking you really don't need to know how many bits are in a byte, but it'd be difficult not to have picked up this kind of information having spent any time in the field. The absence of this knowledge is a strong indicator of shallow expertise.
- schwartzworld 4y agoI knew the answer, but that's because I learned it as a kid. I've never seen bits or bytes mentioned in resources for learning high level languages, nor has the topic ever come up in a professional setting. For a professional dev in a high level language, this basically is a useless piece of trivia. It doesn't hint at trouble, because my code runs on machines that measure memory in gigabytes or at least hundreds of megabytes. Gatekeeping.
- wink 4y agoI'm sorry to disappoint you, but the so called high level languages like Python or Java are perfectly capable of working with bits and bytes, and countless developers have done so. The gatekeeping card won't fly here. This is not some obscure implementation detail of C/C++.
- schwartzworld 4y agoI know they can work with bits and bytes, but your average web dev often doesn't get into that kind of stuff. I don't need the bitshift operator to put a button on a webpage or expose an endpoint.