3 ms·

Yes, every developer needs 114 pages worth of knowledge about memory.

by lizardking 3y ago

mrwnmonm 3y ago
Yeah, I read some of it before, and had no idea why I would need this.
- mmkos 3y ago
  Whenever articles like this bubbled up, I used to want to delve right in to satisfy some inner need to be deeply knowledgeable about the craft. I don't feel that way anymore now that I'm in my 30s, something flipped. Now I'm much more interested in higher-level abstractions and building complete products that solve some real problems, rather than occupying myself learning about the nitty gritty details of how software works under the hood. I think it's maybe nice to know how we interact with memory in software (memory allocation/deallocation, naybe how manual memory mgmt is done, something about garbage collection?), but that's about it.
  - vbh21 3y ago
    I feel the same wayy now that I'm older. The nitty-gritty of some of the memory management stuff just isn't relevant. The work I'm doing now is at a different scale and I let the language designers worry about this. It is still useful to know some details as they apply when I'm programming, but a lot of this stuff just doesn't command my attention!
mhh__ 3y ago
Yes, why not? You don't have to understand all of it but if you can't be bothered to get the gist of this maybe computers aren't for you? Note that I'm implicitly making a distinction between people who write code and people who are explicitly developers.
- lizardking 3y ago
  This is gatekeeping. People who develop software are developers. Many (probably most) of them have done so for years without 114 pages worth of in depth knowledge of how memory works. So by definition they don't need to know it to do their jobs successfully.
  - jpc0 3y ago
    They don't need to know it but then it should also not be a surprise to you when programs take gigabytes of memory and several seconds to do things that used to kilobytes of memory and milliseconds, for the same workload. Delving deep gives you fundamental knowledge of systems, sometimes there isn't time for that which in that case use the generic library that does stuff you never needed and ship the product. But in 10 years time when that needs to actually become performant code you need to know how to fix it or someone else will be paid to do it instead.

Yes, every developer needs 114 pages worth of knowledge about memory.

mrwnmonm 3y ago

Yeah, I read some of it before, and had no idea why I would need this.

mmkos 3y ago
Whenever articles like this bubbled up, I used to want to delve right in to satisfy some inner need to be deeply knowledgeable about the craft. I don't feel that way anymore now that I'm in my 30s, something flipped. Now I'm much more interested in higher-level abstractions and building complete products that solve some real problems, rather than occupying myself learning about the nitty gritty details of how software works under the hood. I think it's maybe nice to know how we interact with memory in software (memory allocation/deallocation, naybe how manual memory mgmt is done, something about garbage collection?), but that's about it.
- vbh21 3y ago
  I feel the same wayy now that I'm older. The nitty-gritty of some of the memory management stuff just isn't relevant. The work I'm doing now is at a different scale and I let the language designers worry about this. It is still useful to know some details as they apply when I'm programming, but a lot of this stuff just doesn't command my attention!

mhh__ 3y ago

Yes, why not? You don't have to understand all of it but if you can't be bothered to get the gist of this maybe computers aren't for you? Note that I'm implicitly making a distinction between people who write code and people who are explicitly developers.

lizardking 3y ago
This is gatekeeping. People who develop software are developers. Many (probably most) of them have done so for years without 114 pages worth of in depth knowledge of how memory works. So by definition they don't need to know it to do their jobs successfully.
- jpc0 3y ago
  They don't need to know it but then it should also not be a surprise to you when programs take gigabytes of memory and several seconds to do things that used to kilobytes of memory and milliseconds, for the same workload. Delving deep gives you fundamental knowledge of systems, sometimes there isn't time for that which in that case use the generic library that does stuff you never needed and ship the product. But in 10 years time when that needs to actually become performant code you need to know how to fix it or someone else will be paid to do it instead.