4 ms·
Welsh was a tenured Harvard CA professor until 2010. While there may be some hyperbole, it seems like he’s speaking from some experience of understanding a top
by smugma 4y ago
Welsh was a tenured Harvard CA professor until 2010. While there may be some hyperbole, it seems like he’s speaking from some experience of understanding a top tier undergraduate curriculum (and if you don't consider Harvard top tier, he did his PhD at Berkeley before that). My guess is that his bar for “understanding” is higher than yours and the other commenter who suggests 50% of programmers understand CPU design. Even if you took an upper division HW design class 20 years ago, a fair bit has changed and there’s a good chance you've forgotten a bit since then.
- renewedrebecca 4y agoNice argument from authority ya got there.
- dinkumthinkum 4y agoHe can be tenured all over the place but it doesn’t make his statements true. I think this is too charitable. I think he is clearly trying to make a very sloppy point that “99%” of programmers know nothing about hardware and are just making web apps or something to that effect. I think it’s too charitable to suggest his statement there is some ultra expertise bar he is clawing at. He’s not talking about quantum physics or anything like that; I am sure he is trying to convey that 99% of programmers don’t know surface things like branch prediction or what a super scalar pipeline is. He’s not talking about the intricacies if Sandy Brudge or anything like that. And, he’s wrong. He’s just trying to make a hand-wavy point abs relies on his pedigree to be taken seriously.
- sgu999 4y agoHe may be right in saying that 99% of devs don't know what's under, but the 1% remaining is still a larger crowd that the total amount of devs of the 80s... and they are still essential to the industry.