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

Re:It doesn't matter.

[Vellmont]

Today's machines are over a hundred times faster than they were 10 years ago

The raw CPU power times the amount of cores is 100 times faster. How much faster is the I/O? Serving up web pages is mostly about I/O. I/O from the memory, I/O from the database, I/O to the end user. The CPU is usually a small part of it.

You actually sound like a perfect example of what the article is talking about. People who don't understand where the bottlenecks lie. Hell, it even mentioned the misunderstanding of the I/O bottlneck that exists today.