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> "you need to work out what you want in this other paradigm and then translate it"

Not really. You wouldn't expect good programs from someone who has no idea how a computer works. The language is the knobs and dials. You need to know what the knobs and dials do in the machine.

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> Not really. You wouldn't expect good programs from someone who has no idea how a computer works.

I wouldn't expect them to write a good operating system, but for the vast majority of code that is being written you can get pretty far with "your cpu is faster than your memory" as the only bit of knowledge about how computers work.

I've once read a blog entry from a developer who was hired to speed up some piece of software. He achieved a few hundred fold speed up. Not primarily because he is so good (though he is), but because the original developer had a large matrix of numbers stored as a 2d-array of strings and converted them back and forth whenever he had to do an operation on that matrix. You simply can't make up the shit that some people will do.

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