Some people stopped worrying about not understanding compilers. They're not working on drivers, realtime (esp where low lag & jitter are concerned such as motion control), or high performance software of all stripes, trying to squeeze the most out of the available hardware. It's all about choosing the right tool for the job, and there is no right tool for every job. A guy generating sales reports has very, very different needs from the lady writing a rendering engine.
Michael Abrash (graphics programmer extraordinaire) said it best, and I'll paraphrase: the best optimizing compiler is between your ears. The right algorithm beats the pants off the most optimized wrong algorithm. Or, as i like to say "there is nothing faster than nothing" -- finding a way to avoid a computation is the ultimate optimization.
And managed memory is wonderful, almost all the time. That is, just until the GC decides to do a big disposal and compaction right in the middle of a time-sensitive loop causing that thing that "always works" to break, unpredictably, due to a trigger based on memory pressure. Been there, done that. If it's a business report or a ETL, big deal. If it's a motor-control loop running equipment, your data or machinery is now trash.
For most of the programming world, and I count myself in this group, the highly abstracted stuff is great. Right up until the moment where something unexpected doesn't work then it turns in to a cargo cult performance because it's nearly all black-box below. Turtles, all the way down.
There is value in understanding the whole stack, even today.
> Some people stopped worrying about not understanding compilers.
But no, it's not some people, it's not most people, it's 99%+ of all developers that stopped worrying about compilers. There will always be a use case for it, but when we're talking about < 1% of all developers we're really spending time talking about a niche.
There will always be niches in any industry, but we shouldn't design our industry/profession about niche cases.
While I 100% agree with you, as a Java dev who is very interested in optimization (particularly register coloring) at a certain point I think you have to realize that any "compiler type" optimizations you do (Ooh, I'll optimize my variable declaration order to not spill to memory!) is just ignored and re optimized by most compilers worth their weight in salt. Therefore, it's totally counter productive. All the time spent worrying about GC lag is, IMO, wasted compared to other more productive things. I haven't programmed anything mechanical in over 6 years. Basically, for your average developer, while I highly recommend learning the whole stack, I don't believe the notion that understanding the whole stack will actually lead to tangible improvements for programmers. They'd be better served focusing purely on theory (and by theory I mean algorithms).
As a side note: I hate hardware, but I love graph algorithms, which is why I love register coloring so much :)
well as always when discussing functional programming people are not discussing the merits of functional programming but rather the merits of basically throwing away objective programming in favor of functional programming.
That is ofcourse complete nonsense but modern computer science politics like all modern politics only deals in absolutes
Michael Abrash (graphics programmer extraordinaire) said it best, and I'll paraphrase: the best optimizing compiler is between your ears. The right algorithm beats the pants off the most optimized wrong algorithm. Or, as i like to say "there is nothing faster than nothing" -- finding a way to avoid a computation is the ultimate optimization.
And managed memory is wonderful, almost all the time. That is, just until the GC decides to do a big disposal and compaction right in the middle of a time-sensitive loop causing that thing that "always works" to break, unpredictably, due to a trigger based on memory pressure. Been there, done that. If it's a business report or a ETL, big deal. If it's a motor-control loop running equipment, your data or machinery is now trash.
For most of the programming world, and I count myself in this group, the highly abstracted stuff is great. Right up until the moment where something unexpected doesn't work then it turns in to a cargo cult performance because it's nearly all black-box below. Turtles, all the way down.
There is value in understanding the whole stack, even today.