Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

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"Java (understanding the JVM and OOP concepts)"

I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM and I would think, that most java programmers do exactly this. I think only in high performance scenarios knowing more is beneficial?

But I have not touched java in a long time .. as I have indeed choosen the web as plattform.

But I don't feel threatened by the high school kids coming from boot camps.

Edit:

I know what a pointer is, so I can work closely with wasm libaries. I know algorithms and how to structure data and why I am structuring data this way in this case, so I can adopt in another case. I know how to achieve performant simple code. I know how to debug layers of code with sideeffects over sideeffects. Raceconditions, memory leaks, etc. (All a thing in js, too). Using and understanding the profiler etc.

Someone coming from a coding bootcamp, does not know this. He or she might learn it after years of practice, which is allright by me - but they are no direct threat to me, despite that I don't even really know react for example.

not feeling threatened doesn't mean you're not under threat.

It's entirely possible that between your skill level and those boot campers is a few(dozen) percents of workforce. But at the same time it's entirely possible that if you are not as quickly progressing as the growth of the industry, you could become a part of the same percentile as bootcampers in no time.

Just like it's entirely possible you could be hit by a meteorite.

Focus on what you can control and let go of that which you cannot.

It's not only about performance, it's also about maintainability. Codebases written by inexperienced programmers are extremely convoluted, nothing is decoupled and functions are extremely long and do multiple things. Extremely hard code to maintain or add features to.

A lot of the Java programmers I know professionally know fuck all about JVM internals, etc. Its largely unnecessary unless you have to chase down some extremely subtle bug most of the time.

A lot of them are senior or principal product engineers at companies you will have heard of.

Whereas with C, its extremely necessary to get into the weeds - otherwise your code just crashes or suffers some memory corruption issue, race condition, etc etc.

> I am pretty sure that you can programm java without knowing details about the JVM

yeah that was the whole point of object oriented programming and Java to begin with. You don't need to know the details of the underlying implementation, focus on the problem you're trying to solve.

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