3 ms·
That may be true, but it will not be until you descend the stack you start to code like someone who understands what they are doing. For instance I started off
by roskilli 13y ago
That may be true, but it will not be until you descend the stack you start to code like someone who understands what they are doing. For instance I started off with PHP in high school and was using arrays with each entry as a string with a colin in it to split a key and value apart. So essentially I created the worlds worst hashmap and each lookup was O(N) - not to mention the actual string splitting I was doing on each element which would've most likely caused several memory copies.
Why not at least start with some basics at the bottom of the stack and ascend quickly? As Dijkstra mentions he believes a lot of people have had at least small exposure to programming prior to their tertiary education - hence they probably already started at some point in the stack anyhow.
- scott_s 13y agoWhat's the bottom? You clearly have something in mind, but why not starting with logic gates and work up to assembly? That is also a valid approach, and it works up to what you consider the bottom of the stack. I do computer systems research. I am a big proponent of knowing how computer systems work. But I think people have an unhealthy fetish for how we start learning. You start once. You learn the rest of your life. Where you start is not the most important thing.
- AnimalMuppet 13y agoBah. The bottom of the stack is quantum mechanics and solid state physics. From there, you learn how individual transistors work. From that, you build up to logic gates. I actually know something about those levels. But in 25 years as a professional programmer, the lowest level I've ever actually needed to use was at the gate level (PAL equations to generate chip selects by decoding addresses - if it wasn't in a PAL, it would be just equations).