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I encountered juniors straight out of school who don’t know what tar is, or rsync, or what a symlink is. It’s all learnable and everyone starts somewhere. But
by shermantanktop 3mo ago
I encountered juniors straight out of school who don’t know what tar is, or rsync, or what a symlink is.
It’s all learnable and everyone starts somewhere. But you’d think natural curiosity would kick in and they’d have picked up some of this on their own by the time they have a job.
- christophilus 3mo agoIf they were Windows game developers, they wouldn’t have to touch any of that. I guess it depends on where their interests lie and what platform they developed on.
- wildzzz 3mo agoIf all you do is write code for Windows, why would you need to know what any of that is?
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- zikduruqe 3mo agoBecause Steam... /s
- Telaneo 3mo agoI didn't even know about tar or rsync until I started to use Linux, and I don't really see how else one get to the point where you need to know about them. And even symlinks are still in my mind as 'shortcuts but [...]' (even though the other way around is probably more accurate). Even as a dev, it's very possible to go through life without touching Linux.
- t-3 3mo agoIf you've built any open source software ever, it's pretty hard not to know of tar, even if you don't know exactly what it is. I think it's reasonable to expect anyone interested in computers would be familiar with common compression tools, let alone a CS major.
- Telaneo 3mo ago> I think it's reasonable to expect anyone interested in computers would be familiar with common compression tools So 7zip and Winrar? I joke, but only halfway. If you're only normal Windows user, you'd never hear of anything else (unless you want to go back to Winzip, which does still exist, but I've never heard of anyone using it any more).
- shermantanktop 3mo agoOk, sure, windows. But here’s one I heard literally two days ago: we counted three engineers (out of many) who knew that physical memory was not actually a giant flat space of contiguous addresses, and that there were multiple layers of address-mapping and region-joining glue logic between a program and the hardware, including in os libraries, and even inside the hardware. Maybe knowing such information is archaic or useless for most engineers. But the good ones (or at least a certain flavor of the good ones) ask questions that lead them there.
- masfuerte 3mo agoBut physical memory is a giant flat space of contiguous addresses. Do you mean virtual memory?
- customguy 3mo agoHow could it be? For example, each memory stick doesn't know beforehand what other memory sticks it will be used with, so the "physical" addressing of the memory on each stick has to be independent of the others, i.e. a local address, that gets mapped to a virtual one.
- hvb2 3mo agoBut that's not relevant? What would be relevant if, depending on where your bits are stored, acces time is significantly slower. If, regardless of where my data goes, my access time is constant then I do not care as a dev? That's the abstraction I'm working with when coding. Which is necessary because in most cases this should be an implementation detail.
- customguy 3mo agoReally not caring about something also means not making a positive and false claim about it. What I said was relevant to that claim. That claim in turn was, according to your heuristics, not relevant (for daily coding).
- 3mo ago
- jasonkester 3mo agoFor what it’s worth, I recently retired from a 30 year career as a developer and while I’m aware of all three of those things, I’ve never used any of them in or out of work. And I’ve hosted my own web server these last 20 years.
- inigyou 3mo agoWindows web server?