As an old-school software gal, it's amazing to me how software engineers these days think, too. The sentence "ever wondered why integers in software are powers of two?" made a very powerful point for me - namely, how far software engineering these days is removed from the underlying implementation.

Mind, I don't fault the author for being surprised. It's a logical consequence of that remove. But as somebody who grew up with blinkenlights and core memory, the idea of not knowing this fact is completely foreign to me, even though I have no HW skills worth mentioning.

Part of me wonders if that means we should teach SW engs about those realities. Especially given the authors wide-eyed realization that all that code executes in parallel, all the time. It's a mental model that seems rather useful given the amount of parallelism we see and will be seeing.

Or maybe I'm just old and grumpy ;)