On Thu, 22 Dec 2011 10:07:32 +0100, Kevin Wright
<[email protected]> wrote:
Total rubbish. We must start with a solid grounding in VLSI design and
the
core principles of modern processor architecture - paying particular
attention to pipelining, branch prediction, virtual addressing and shared
memory schemes in a multi-core design. Then progress onto raw machine
code.
Only after that should something as high-level as C be considered.
Anything else is just a slippery slope, before you know it we'll have
people expecting to be able to drive without having rebuilt so much as a
single engine!
</flippancy>
Misused flippancy, I'd say. :-) I'm not expected to be the guy who builds
the car, but as the guy who drives it I should know what happens when I
drive it pushing to the limits, for instance using a lower gear than the
manual says (americans please find another appropriate example). In fact,
what's happening now with cars stuffed with technology is that people are
fine in 90% of cases, but get helpless in unusual conditions. If you
answer by pointing out the fucking manual, that's academia, because
manuals won't explain how to behave in very unusual (and maybe unexpected)
conditions.
In fact, I'm constantly seeing new generations of engineers that have been
only taught with fun high level languages being totally unable not only to
understand a trivial cause of a performance hit, but even lacking the
mental tools to investigate it (which is truly a disaster). Just because
they are unable to go under the hood for the required amount (which is not
of course understanding VLSI, but the basics such as machine instructions,
memory, caches, hits and misses, stacks, heap, compiler optimisations,
etc...). This is blatantly demonstrated by the more and more frequent blog
posts where people present a surprising result of a micro-benchmark, just
to be debunked in a few minutes when somebody points out that they just
understand nothing about how the JIT works...
--
Fabrizio Giudici - Java Architect, Project Manager
Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere."
[email protected]
http://tidalwave.it - http://fabriziogiudici.it
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