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The low level developer hasn't gone. They're just a smaller proportion of a much larger population of developers. That makes them harder to find, but there sti
by adrianhoward 15y ago
The low level developer hasn't gone. They're just a smaller proportion of a much larger population of developers.
That makes them harder to find, but there still there. Wouldn't be surprised to find out there are actually more of them than there were 20 years back.
The border of where "low level" begins is also shifting. I, for one, am glad I no longer have to hand assemble my own multiplication code :-)
- olalonde 15y agoIn China, there is a lot of low level programmers. I guess it has to do with the fact that electronics are all manufactured here. If you live in Silicon Valley/Seattle, where most startups are building web apps, it's not surprising to see few low level programmers.
- jbester 15y agoThey still exist in the US, they are working "embedded" now. Embedded has made a huge jump in the last 15 years from custom OSes or no-OS to now COTS RTOSes/Linux. Even the embedded guys lament the newer guys can't debug an ISR anymore...
- SteveMoody73 15y agoI'm an embedded developer myself and while the original article is aimed at game development it is just as valid for embedded development. I've come across many situations where saving a few extra bytes of RAM here and there and saving a few instructions during an interrupt routine have been vital.
- yummyfajitas 15y agoIt's even valid at much higher levels, sometimes. Hadoop gives you high levels of abstraction, but you can still get major performance gains with small adjustments to file formats. http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/mapwritable_sometimes_a_performance_hog.html http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2011/mapwritable_sometimes...
- lutorm 15y agoI wonder if the popularity of the Arduino will make this kind of knowledge more mainstream? Certainly coding with 2.5k of RAM is very different from writing things for desktops or even smartphones.
- angersock 15y agoAre they any good? EDIT: Honest question... didn't mean to come off wrong there. :(