| > I didn't foresee this much discussion about it, but I think it's good. Your comment about not knowing bitwise OR was fine. I looked at your blog and could easily see that your background is designer (HTML+CSS) and then programmer (Javascript, Ruby, etc). If anyone reasonable keeps this in mind, they would actually be surprised if you did know what bitwise OR was because a developer who built knowledge in that sequence wouldn't need to come across it. There are large swaths of programming communities that don't come across the bitwise OR topic. This includes ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) programmers such as SAP, PeopleSoft. Linux/Windows admins writing bash or Powershell scripts. The office power user writing Visual Basic macros for Excel spreadsheets. And of course, many web developers. All these folks are productive doing "programming" and yet they get by without bitwise OR. When a programmer is surprised at why developers of <insert_whatever_technology> doesn't know <insert_whatever_knowledge_he_happens_to_know>, it's often because he forgets that others interface with programming tasks quite differently from him. A typical type of programmer that would know bitwise OR is a C/C++/assembly programmer. But even within this group, there would be knowledge that one C programmer would be "surprised" that another C programmer doesn't know. For example, a C programmer might not know the intricacies of the Link process. Well if that C programmer was a university student that only used the C language to write 500 line programs to calculate matrices for his science experiments, he may not know the subtleties of the Compile & Link. To him, it's all just a black box to spit out an executable file. When he needs to know what "can't resolve symbol" error means, he'll learn what the LINK in COMPILE+LINK actually does. |