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Because you'll come out of the experience a MUCH better programmer; MUCH, MUCH better. In fact, until you've written a low level device driver and understood the complexities involved, you cannot really understand how much better a programmer you can be. 1) You get better because you learn to manage complexities that are simply not found in MOST application level programs; exceptions are stuff like high-performance database servers and their ilk. You should come out with a really good understanding of how to write multithreaded code, for example; 2) You learn to manage a really big project with lots of related, but complex interconnections; 3) There really is a huge benefit from learning just how a system works at the low-level in becoming a master programmer. Things like cache-issues, virtual memory management, are topics that you may not use everyday, but knowledge of how and what goes on gives you a whole new level of insight. Anyone who wants to become a master programmer should implement a toy operating system (we can't all be Linus) and a toy compiler. Even better, implement a compiler and then implement the operating system using that compiler. And the final reason: because it's amazing FUN. That is, if you really like programming. It's so complex, so much hard work and hard thinking, that when your first application program, just Hello World, actually runs to completion, you get high. |