> Why is it important to teach the underlying mechanics of a computer in a data structures course, or an algorithms course, or really anything beyond OS or comp

> Why is it important to teach the underlying mechanics of a computer in a data structures course, or an algorithms course, or really anything beyond OS or computer architecture courses (and perhaps a compilers course)? I'd say this is an extremely important part of a data structures course. Say we have an array of integers and a linked list of integers. Which will take less time to iterate through? We all know it's the array, but you have to be aware of how caching works to know that that's the case. Which takes less space in memory? Again, we know it's the array, but you have to understand pointers to know why that's the case. If you only know what a linked list is in the abstract, then you'll have a hard time reasoning about space usage when compared to an array. These are just a few examples, but there are countless more. It's hard to reason about how the different data structures work in the real world if you don't know how the computer works. > The reality is that the way computers work "under the hood" is counterintuitive in an extreme sense. Since when was CS about teaching only what's intuitive?