[Dewie]

I learned Java for my intro to programming. Later, I guess 2 years or so later, I began to take an interest into how and why programming languages work. Java throws an error if my index is out of bounds, which means it needs to check it itself, but what would happen if it didn't? What do I need garbage collection for? Why can't the compiler stack-allocate most objects whose references don't escape the scope of the method? How does the runtime know when it has run out of stack space? Does it check it on every new stack frame? Does the stack grow dynamically, or is it allocated ahead of time into one continuous, monolithic chunk? Can an ideal compiler infer the maximum size that the call stack will have at run time (modulo Halting Problem)?

I don't feel that my curiosity was permanently damaged by learning Java. On the other hand, I wouldn't have necessarily have wanted to learn anything about lower-level languages for its own sake, except perhaps only out of some sense of duty that 'every programmer should know this and that'. But since I have an interest in programming languages - which I of course didn't know that I would develop when I was learning my very first programming language - these things became relevant to me later.