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> I never had to shift a bit in a C array in my life!

I have done (and continue to do) quite a bit of work involving bit shifting, along with various other bitwise operations. Is it really that unusual? Should I feel guilty?

Humor aside, I am genuinely curious to what extent other people are familiar or experienced with low-level bitwise operations.

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Agreed - when I was working on gpu drivers bit shifting was a daily practice.

I imagine that very few people who work with higher abstraction level languages (java, c#, go, js) are experienced at all with that.

C# developer here. Bit shifting is super useful for defining flags and flags are awesome. In the web app world, I don't really come across the need for bit shifting outside of flags. If I am building something in Unity or GodotSharp, there are far more opportunities where bit-shifting is useful.

I generally agree with your statement when referring to code bootcamp graduates, but anyone with a CS degree should have learned bitshifting by their second programming course; YMMV.

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