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I should have made myself more clear - the language's virtual machine.
All higher-language programming is done to a "virtual machine" of some type. Even C assumes certain things about the hardware it is running on. It is in this sense that I refer to a virtual machine.
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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honey the codewitch wrote: It feels like such a blessing sometimes.
It is...
I can't do it. But coming from the PLC world, I (at least) still know how to be efficient and careful about resources way more that the average programer.
My senior once told me he enjoyed the brainstormings with me, because I many times managed to blow his mind with questions like "mmm... if I understood you correctly, you are trying X, couldn't it be done using Y?" And Y was way simpler and many times with better performance than what he was coding.
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I have met people who had to be able to imagine the microcode, and the specific signals sent to the various units of the CPU, to feel that they had a good grip on the software. Knowing the nature of static vs. dynamic RAM is essential to understand the effect of cache size on performance.
When compilers started using optimizing techniques (that was with Fortran II, wasn't it? Long before my time  ), I lost grip on how the assembly code generated from my high level code will look. The optimizer moves stuff all over the place, may remove significant parts (e.g. as unreachable, or because that subexpression was calculated earlier so it is available in a temporary location), and so on.
Donald Knuth didn't trust any high level concepts. If he had, maybe his Bible would have gained a large following. It ended up with his Bible being something that sits on the bookshelf. To learn algorithms, you rather go to books based on concepts relevant to the programmer's problem, not to the CPU designer.
Gradually, I have come to trust the compiler. I know that not everyone does: In my scrapbook archive, I have preserved a discussion from a network forum where this one guy fiercely insisted that the VAX C compiler should have generated a different instruction, which this debater thought more appropriate. Others pointed out that the actually generated code was faster, but the debater stuck to his conclusion: The compiler was defect, generating inappropriate code.
Yet ... I am sometimes shocked by how willingly youngsters even with a university degree accept that "If you just flip this switch and push that button, it works - but I have no idea of why!" I still maintain that you should understand what is going on at least one level below the one you are working on. The thing is that today, I work at least two levels up from where I was as a student. Microcode and assembler is way below my current programming problems. I relate to objects and structures and parallelism, not to bytes and instructions. Say, subclassing and superclassing; that is understood conceptually, not as how they map to machine instructions. Not even how they map to C! My first encounter with C++, in my student days, was a compiler translating C++ to K&R C code, which required a second compilation pass. I enjoyed it then, but nowadays, I no longer find it worth the effort. Same with overloading: I learned how the compiler generates method labels based on the argument classes. Today, I know that the problem is solved; I have to know the rules for legal overloading, but not which signals the instruction decoder sends to the various parts of the CPU. Not even the binary instruction.
Obviously: If I were working with low-level drivers directly interfacing with hardware, instruction and binary data formats would be essential to understand. But not even a driver programmer needs to be concerned about internal signal paths in the CPU.
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What you say is true for all technology. We all use it, mostly with only a vague idea of how it works "on the inside". This is one of the advantages of componentization.
Where optimizing compilers are concerned, I have learnt to trust them as well. They are merely the latest in a "chain of trust" stretching from the CPU hardware through the microcode, etc. Just as very few of us build our own CPUs, very few of us manually optimize our own code.
As for Knuth, I must disagree somewhat. My copy of Knuth gets used a few times a year - not for the MIX code, but for the description and specification of algorithms. I find his language to be clearer than that of many authors who white books with titles like "Algorithms in <language of the month>", and usually with fewer errors.
On one level, I couldn't care less if my code were executed by tiny elves as long as they executed it correctly. On another, I share your shock at the lack of curiosity about the inner workings shown by so many young'uns.
EDIT: fixed grammar & typos. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
modified 27-Jun-22 15:31pm.
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Honey, you are a rare breed.
"A little time, a little trouble, your better day"
Badfinger
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I visualize the happy faces of my customers when they're using my software 
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I would rather visualize my happy face when they pay for the software!
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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I have never looked at assembly code, so I can't visualize it even in pseudo-code, but I have been developing an interest in learning the basic algorithms for byte manipulation just for fun and to perhaps optimize code better.
C? It was my first real love in programming languages because it satisfied my inner megalomaniac. With UNIX environment variables and C, I could rule the cyber world (muah-ha-ha-ha!). But that was ages ago - back when C++ was just a baby and not well loved. We were creating objects in C and saw no need for a new language to do that. So I image that if I bothered with C++, my answer would be yes, because I'd be learning C++ through the lens of C programming, which is how I expect to learn Rust (which is a just for fun thing I'm going to do).
I'm a php web developer, which is pretty much as far from C as one can get. It's a 'forgiving' language, which is to say, it won't let you (fill in the blank). It assumes what you want and does that, even if what you want is an endless fork loop (lol). There is no declaring of variables, no acquisition of memory, no requirement for garbage collection most of the time - you can even have variables that are one type in some cases and another type in other cases. It's very different from C. I have no experience with C# and wonder how like C it is. I would learn it just to see (no pun intended), but I think I'll learn Rust instead.
As to the unusual nature of this, I'm curious to find out, but I do think it rather rare. It is what I would look for if I were ever in the position of hiring.
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Started with machine code. Went on to assembler, then C (with assembler functions, cos I could opimize better than the compiler). So I find it natural to think about what's happening at low-level.
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I used to think that way about memory layouts in C/C++, but strings in the newer languages where everything wants to be on the heap make it kind of pointless.
I trust the optimizers in the compilers for the execution flow. (Unless it is a C compiler from DEC where I recommend /DEBUG to disable optimizations)
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They haven't got the first idea of cleaning up after themselves. 
Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
-- 6079 Smith W.
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You shouldn't have fed them managed code. 
Software rusts. Simon Stephenson, ca 1994. So does this signature. me, 2012
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I will assume they are all hunt and peck when it comes to the keyboard!
If you can't laugh at yourself - ask me and I will do it for you.
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:GROAN: 
Software Zen: delete this;
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... And I can't tell if it's a regular expression or he just walked over the keyboard ...
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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(I may have posted this before, if so, apologies)
Back in the day when I used Wordstar to write all of our user manuals I had been really stuck into some heavy duty writing and had forgotten to save my work for some time ...
To close down Wordstar without saving any of your work required the rather complicated keystroke sequence of Ctrl+KQY.
Any other sequence would result in nothing happening or at worst an error message.
Any. Other. Sequence. Of. Keystrokes.
Enter my cat (kitten) ... took a stroll over the keyboard... Hesitated when I screamed, with its paw hovering over the Y. Looked me right in the eye and placed that paw down. Evil incarnate, I swear.
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Back in the day when I was using Wordstar I was using it on Z80 Superbrains.
The reset for a Superbrain was to press the red keys at each end of the keyboard simultaneously. Something that YOU WOULD NEVER DO accidentally.
In comes my two year old daughter.
"Ooh look two red buttons", pressed simultaneously by index fingers of two hands.
BANG!!
All work gone!
Ah well. (I'm sure that those were the days!)
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OMG - Superbrains ... me too! Those were days, not sure about the "the"
Did myself an injury trying to carry one of those into the warehouse - slipped on a step and landed sternum-first on the keyboard edge. The SB survived unscathed (well, we finally found the T key at the other end of the warehouse), but two of my ribs were broken!
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Reminds me of a joke from many years ago about the TECO text editor[^] on DEC equipment. You could enter your full name and it would be a valid set of commands. It was interesting to see what actually happened.
Software Zen: delete this;
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This was well known in my student days (early 1980s): People with names that actually did something useful when typed in Teco enjoyed a certain reputation and fame.
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Not really. He's more of a tester, but he does work his paws to the bone. It's a good thing the work isn't too ruff. He's shed all of his other dooties.
".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010
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You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010
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When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013
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If I ever need a piece of high-performance piece of code, I'll teach my dog. He's a greyhound, the 2nd fastest land animal on Earth, just behind the cheetah.
Software Zen: delete this;
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We have a couple of rescue GH's that come down to the beach, when they start to run the labs just stand there in awe, it is a wonderful sight to see them run just for fun!
Never underestimate the power of human stupidity -
RAH
I'm old. I know stuff - JSOP
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Mycroft Holmes wrote: it is a wonderful sight to see them run just for fun!
It is indeed. Zoomies, even in a small yard like mine, are amazing!
Software Zen: delete this;
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