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by gugagore 561 days ago
> programming is about telling a computer how to actually add 156 with 1571 by adding bit to bit

programming can also be about producing generic solutions that commit to some minimal set of assumptions so that solutions work across a variety of contexts, e.g. regardless of whether your data is floats or ints.

sometimes good engineering is about finding decisions you can avoid making or thinking about. Sometimes you have to decide how to add the numbers bit by bit, but for that particular example, it's even better to not care about how the numbers are added up (which is a detail of the CPU or a bignum library or whatever).