Well, the voting on this question and the other replays could explain why most code in the wild looks like it was written by people who don't know how computers

Well, the voting on this question and the other replays could explain why most code in the wild looks like it was written by people who don't know how computers work… Sad, but this here is quite telling imho. I don't say that you need to be an expert on low level programming to write good code (sometimes this is even a hindrance as quite some of these people are prone to the premature optimization anti-pattern) but one should imho know at least the basics and have a high level overview of the low level stuff. But frankly the reality is that even people who struggle with mere syntax, people who have no clue whatsoever what's going actually on, "contribute" code way to often to the corpus that you need to deal with in professional settings. </rant> Edith thinks I should at least praise the great article we're commenting on here! Very nice write up. The only thing that I miss a little bit is a kind of "disclaimer" that what gets presented is "just" the result of a market race, and not how computers need necessary to work like. Not going into the details of possible hardware architectures and implementation, but even on the "user facing" level (the operating system and application layer) things can look very, very differently. Just as an example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genera_(operating_system)