What Today's Coders Don't Know and Why It Matters

jfruhlinger writes "Today's programmers have much more advanced languages and more forgiving hardware to play with — but it seems many have forgotten some of the lessons their predecessors picked up in a more resource-constrained era. Newer programmers are less adept at identifying hardware constraints and errors, developing thorough specifications before coding, and low-level skills like programming in assembly language. You never know when a seemingly obsolete skill will come in handy. For instance, Web developers who cut their teeth in the days of 14.4 Kbps modems have a leg up in writing apps for laggy wireless networks."

Comments

Fashion

[funkatron]

So your particular skillset has fallen out of vogue for a while; it happens. If this stuff is useful, it'll come back. For instance, a lot of the hardware related skills mentioned are still around, they're just considered to be a specialisation these days, in most situations it's safe to assume that the hardware either performs within spec or that the lower layer (OS etc) is dealing with any irregularities.

Re:It doesn't matter.

[jackb_guppy]

I love D Knuth and have read is sorting and searching book many time over, always finding good times.

SPEED does mater and so does SIZE and BANDWIDTH. It is important to design things right the first time versus loops and loops of daily optimization that must code is written in today. The understanding of record-locks, index optimization and other multiplexing methods are needed today. I see too much of sucking a 1+ million peaces into memory to find 1 item, "Because it is fast".

Yes this sounds like "get of my grass", but "fast and sloppy", is a waste on everyone's resources not just a single computer.