Comment by msiyer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by msiyer | Hacker News Reader

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I agree.

I have known people who would not move to the next chapter in a book unless they understood the one they are reading in its entirety. I have pointed out the inherent impossibility of such an endeavor. They do not listen. I think this obsession with tech stack or architecture is related to this.

I am extremely passionate about a lot of subjects. However, I am not passionate about "technology X or Y". Technologies and programming languages are just tools for me. I like some more than the others, but they are just tools. It is like saying that I have a great novel in my mind, but I cannot write it down unless I have the "Pen A" or "typewriter X". Also, I will not write the next page down unless I get the current page 100% right. Never gonna happen.

Heck, when I began learning C# a few years ago and people would question me "where do structs in C# live? on the stack or in the heap?" I would get mightily pissed off. How was I supposed to know the internals of a closed-source (erstwhile?) language\framework? What if they change the internals tomorrow? Would this "knowledge" be of any use?

I have ideas. I need tools. I need results. The universe is all about entropy. The internals are constantly changing. However, as a giant mechanism it is always working, always producing results.

> What if they change the internals tomorrow? Would this "knowledge" be of any use?

Sometimes. I think the best response in theme of the thread so far is "When it starts to matter, I'll spend the time looking into it. Until then, I try to know just enough to clue me into whether it might matter."

As a concrete example, I know why stack and heap matter for performance, and I know that maximizing computation in a hot loop in something like assembly requires a fair bit of knowledge of the architecture and what instructions utilize what resources in a CPU you you can plan out usage optimally, but beyond reading some interesting articles that have popped up here, that's all I've bothered to internalize. I haven't done almost anything in C or C++ since college well over a decade ago, and all my day-to-day work is done in Perl. At the point I'm in need of a customized very optimized solution for a computationally heavy workload, I have promising avenues of inquiry to start with. The way I see it, that the optimal strategy for my current goals, and it's been the optimal strategy for quite a while.

>> "When it starts to matter, I'll spend the time looking into it. Until then, I try to know just enough to clue me into whether it might matter."

Exactly.

Stack and heap are not important in the C# example I gave. What matters is whether the data structure is a "reference type" or a "value type". This impacts the way we pass arguments to functions, scope of a variable and related side-effects etc. However, where these types reside has very little meaning since the memory allocation and cleanup etc. are not in developers control at all (unlike C, C++).

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