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Comment by louthy | Hacker News Reader

What every programmer should know about memory shouldn't be 114 pages long.

"A bit more than what most programmers need to know about memory, but would be nice if they read anyways"?

A _lot_ more. I don't see how most programmers would benefit from reading 100+ pages of low-level details about memory.

Because knowing your craft is important? Besides, if you don't find this interesting why become a programmer in the first place

There's a lot to learn about this craft, and people have to prioritize - knowing algorithms & data structures is more immediately useful compared to, say, knowing what scratchpad memory is. If I spent my time learning every detail about every system underpinning every abstraction, I would literally be 70 years old by the time I started writing code.

> Besides, if you don't find this interesting why become a programmer in the first place

Who is saying it's not interesting? We're arguing that it's not fundamentally vital knowledge to know the difference in RAS & CAS latency for SDRAM for most programmers.

But learning algorithms and data structures literally requires you to know about memory on a pretty low level. As I'm sure you know, a lot of algorithms and data structures that are theoretically equal can be vastly different in practice in no small part because of how they use memory.

If you are objecting to "every," then sure, not every programmer needs to know anything about memory. You can program without knowing that there is such a thing.

But it's a fun title, and an excellent resource.

No, he's right. It's more than simply semantics. A better title would be "an extremely overwhelming of programmers don't need to know THIS much about memory"

Or perhaps some more positive phrasings:

- If you know this much about memory, you'll know more than 99% of programmers.

- What 99% of programmers don't know about memory.

The second one reads like a Buzzfeed article...

> What 99% of programmers don't know about memory... number 17 will shock you!

This is what people says when they have a dataset of 100 entries(<100mb) on their developpment laptop. How funny they look when production guys show them how their lame piece of code doesn't scale up with billion of entries in the production platform...But they dont care cause they are developpers, (or so called). Until the production guy rewrite their code and have them fired for incompetence (true story).

> How funny they look when production guys show them how their lame piece of code doesn't scale up with billion of entries in the production platform...But they dont care cause they are developpers, (or so called)

Why did the production guy even need them in the first place? Why were they hired?

> (true story). And that production guy's name was Albert Einstein.

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