Did a micro-architecture directed-study in highschool covering the MIPS architecture, MIPS assembly execution, implementation of many fundamental components suc

Did a micro-architecture directed-study in highschool covering the MIPS architecture, MIPS assembly execution, implementation of many fundamental components such as latches, MUX's, ALU's etc, pipelines, caches, and many other topics of how machines execute programs. To this day, I wind up drilling through several layers of abstraction and run-times naturally simply by having intuition that there is no other way for data to get from point A to point B without it being expressed in registers, atomic instructions, and abstractions that can be built on top of them. I use it to understand theoretical explanations of Turing machines, automatons, fastest implementations of algorithms, buffer overflow exploits, language implementations, data models, OS's, threads, processes, memory addressing, intrinsics, tail-recursion optimizations, JIT's, GC's, objects, C++ vtables...it goes on. Probably anything I will ever study always seems capable of mapping back to a problem space where Jump-and-load has to exist and cache coherency completely breaks down when playing with threads that compete for writes without locks. The course was entirely optional. I was done about half-way through the semester and continued reading the course textbook until I had at least brushed across every part of it. Compared to other subjects of fundamental happenings, such as boot loaders in Linux, studying micro-architecture completely blows open the doors to your long-term capability to problem solve in any space in computing without the slightest question of what happens in the end. In programming communities, as the original knowledge becomes boiled down into maxims and the maxims get repeated without the original discussion, people start parroting the whole argument against early-optimization or complaining about how scripting languages have no type-safety or how impure functions have side-effects and don't have reliable return values. It's very convenient to build your knowledge on the fulcrum of every community teeter-totter, the sheet-metal of every bike-shed, the fundamental logic from which all abstractions are born and all abstractions can be decomposed. Micro-architecture is the axiom space of programming. If you understand micro-architecture, it will give you a path of understanding into anything you will ever encounter in programming. I had studied a lot of anecdotal micro-architecture when following the AMD Intel competitive race when it was at its hottest and reading tons of articles on overclocking and pondering how north-bridges and south-bridges might work, but taking the course basically paved the way for everything else I've done in computing since, much more-so than the C++ intro and OOP classes I took. Languages seem to have no foundation without some micro-architecture experience. You think that there might be some magical way to do X that you simply can't see through the abstractions. After studying micro-architecture, the magic is gone. Everything magic after that is how you abstract those ideas on top of each other.