If you're not working with device drivers, embedded systems, or legacy code/filetypes you probably shouldn't be using bitwise operations. It can be confusing to

If you're not working with device drivers, embedded systems, or legacy code/filetypes you probably shouldn't be using bitwise operations. It can be confusing to other programmers, make your code a mess, and you're repeating optimisations probably found in libraries. This is just a generalisation of course, I use them on occasion. Mostly with string encoding oddities. For me using excessive bit operations is a red flag. I wrote a messy 1000 line file format in C, I found out by chance there was a serialization function in the library. 10 lines, done. I repeated this mistake when I started learning python (pickle, you're the best).