| Its not so much about programmers needing to know the numbers. Its more about programmers needing to know what L1 cache is, the idea that some operations are faster than others, etc. I know a lot of web dev type people who have no idea how the CPU works, what a register is, what paging or virtual memory are, etc. When you're treating compute resources like they're free and abundant (what web devs like to do these days), then of course you don't care. I just wish those devs did care, because their fancy dev machines blind them to the fact that their theoretically simple web app groans on anything other than an i7 with 8Gb ram. Their fast internet and local servers also seem to make them forget why its bad that first load requires megabytes of js. Sometimes I'd rather browse with my cheap tablet and that nonsense seriously blows. There's a lot of gluttony in development these days. I wish every developer was required to take a basic OS or assembly course to see just how much is happening between writing js and having it actually execute. To see what it really means to program a computer and not a web browser. I also wish more devs would take a look at the performance of MS word and the performance of Google Docs and apply a little critical thinking. On my cheap Surface 3 (4gb ram i3) Word loads instantly, sips power, and does everything I'd ever want locally. Docs takes forever, destroys the battery and is slow as molasses in January with both Edge and Chrome. Yes, every programmer does need to know these numbers and why the numbers are what they are. |
I have personally encountered people that dismiss the whole "lets stuff everything in /usr" issue with claiming that everyone (or at least those they care about) are using lights out management anyways.