Donald Knuth has written about this issue in TAOCP. You can read his full explanation here:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~uno/mmix.html but the main point as it applies to actual programming (rather than teaching programming) is this one - "People who are more than casually interested in computers should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is like. Otherwise the programs they write will be pretty weird." He also says that programming for well-designed RISC machines is "pleasant and simple". Funny that we should get on this topic today. I spent a couple hours last night reading the introduction to MMIX. There are a handfull of programs written in MIX which need to be trasnalted to MMIX for the new editions of TAOCP. Dan On 9/9/06, Michael Torrie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I take this post to a somewhat hyperbolic response (reaction) to Josh's comment. However there is truth to this. Real programmers are equally at home with low-level languages, like C or ASM (which is higher than machine language) as well as higher-level languages and other paradigms such as lisp and scheme (which python pays homage too). They also should be familiar with computer architecture. They should understand what pipelining and scheduling is, even if they don't ever deal with it themselves, or even understand the nitty-gritty details.
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