2 ms·

I know that you work in software security, that's why I'm surprised in the first place. In the other case I wouldn't comment at all, because, as I said, I don't

by krick 12y ago

I know that you work in software security, that's why I'm surprised in the first place. In the other case I wouldn't comment at all, because, as I said, I don't think article is bad or good. It's superficial, but nothing new here. It's ok to write superficial articles, because they are useful for somebody as well. The word "deep" is what worried me, not the article itself. It's perfectly natural that not everyone knows how exactly executable loaders work. The same goes for what you called "file formats". That article isn't about that, because, as I said, all interesting parts are skipped. All the facts revealed are that computer executes some files, that are not arcane magic inside, but can be read and decompiled (which isn't even always true, but author doesn't mention it as well, which is natural). Static and dynamic linking are terms everyone should know as well, because even if you use only interpreted languages like Python, once in a while you find some library that requires manual compilation and run into all these nasty problems like required library versions don't match. Or maybe you could notice that the same Qt app compiled for Windows takes a lot more space on the disk than that does when compiled for Linux and ask yourself why. So, it isn't something that only specialists know, it's a basic fact about how computers work. I don't know about today, but 15 years ago you couldn't be considered programmer without knowing that much at least. It's surprising to hear that it is considered deep.

dinkumthinkum 12y ago
I know what you mean. I think any person with proper CS knowledge should know these things, sure. What is nice about this article is it is 1) short, 2) gives people that know roughly how executables work knowledge about tools like readelf and really basic things like objdump. This is not a deep article, at all, not even in the ballpark. But it can give someone a short bite to see and decide if they want to explore deeper references, presumably linked to by the article.
cbd1984 12y ago
> I don't know about today, but 15 years ago you couldn't be considered programmer without knowing that much at least. It's surprising to hear that it is considered deep. 60 years ago, you couldn't be a programmer without knowing the exact binary code of every opcode your machine executed, and how all of the peripherals worked at the lowest possible level. Back then, of course, all programs were trivially small to fit in hilarious amounts of memory and mass storage, and graphical programming was a specialized topic, to put it mildly. Networking in the form we know it now flatly didn't exist. I'm not convinced that the amount of knowledge programmers know has changed, but the kind of knowledge surely has.
- ufmace 12y ago
  That makes me think of the 1986 vintage Mac SE sitting on one of my tables, more as a decoration than anything. It's new enough that it's almost sorta kinda possible to get it on the internet, yet also old enough that it's somewhere between an adventure and a PITA to do so, and pretty challenging to do anything vaguely useful with it once you do. I don't know as much about the nitty gritty details as I'd like, but it's damn cool that I can now write 1 line of Ruby that fires off a query at a web server somewhere, gets a JSON reply, parses it into a Hash, and delivers it back to me, doing roughly a kazillion hugely complex things along the way. It lets us all spend a lot more time building things that are useful to customers instead of scrounging around with bits, fun as that can be sometimes.

by krick 12y ago

dinkumthinkum 12y ago

I know what you mean. I think any person with proper CS knowledge should know these things, sure. What is nice about this article is it is 1) short, 2) gives people that know roughly how executables work knowledge about tools like readelf and really basic things like objdump. This is not a deep article, at all, not even in the ballpark. But it can give someone a short bite to see and decide if they want to explore deeper references, presumably linked to by the article.

cbd1984 12y ago

> I don't know about today, but 15 years ago you couldn't be considered programmer without knowing that much at least. It's surprising to hear that it is considered deep. 60 years ago, you couldn't be a programmer without knowing the exact binary code of every opcode your machine executed, and how all of the peripherals worked at the lowest possible level. Back then, of course, all programs were trivially small to fit in hilarious amounts of memory and mass storage, and graphical programming was a specialized topic, to put it mildly. Networking in the form we know it now flatly didn't exist. I'm not convinced that the amount of knowledge programmers know has changed, but the kind of knowledge surely has.

ufmace 12y ago
That makes me think of the 1986 vintage Mac SE sitting on one of my tables, more as a decoration than anything. It's new enough that it's almost sorta kinda possible to get it on the internet, yet also old enough that it's somewhere between an adventure and a PITA to do so, and pretty challenging to do anything vaguely useful with it once you do. I don't know as much about the nitty gritty details as I'd like, but it's damn cool that I can now write 1 line of Ruby that fires off a query at a web server somewhere, gets a JSON reply, parses it into a Hash, and delivers it back to me, doing roughly a kazillion hugely complex things along the way. It lets us all spend a lot more time building things that are useful to customers instead of scrounging around with bits, fun as that can be sometimes.