If you ask me, you're a bad developer if you don't know hardware. You have to know how it all works and fits together to write code for it.

How in depth?

@cybojenix +1

Nope, you really don't.

Yeah..you need to atleast have a clue

I bet you don't know half of the shit going on in your machine on a electronic level. But.. rant rant rant

@JacksOnF1re i bet you don't know me :)

How much you gave to know about it, really depends on the kind of development youre doing. Its good to know that a pc isnt some kind of black box in which you yell your commands and a tiny wizard does his magic. that's how clients think it works. you can be an amazing database developer (for example) without having a clue how a flipflop works. also nobody has the time to learn everything, you need to specialise ar some point.

You need to know how data is stored and fetched on drives, in ram, and you need to know about registers and caches.
Then basic CPU stuff like pipelines, parallelism, as well as how data is kept up to date across several processor units.
Otherwise you end up using really really bad data structures or algorithms, and trash your performance.

"You have to know how it all works to write code for it"

That is literally the most idiotic statement I've read here on devRant. How old are you?

@freekid your opinion. And why does age matter? How are you supposed to write optimized algorithms without knowing how your computer actually runs it?

I think that a basic hardware knowledge would be good for every dev. But you don't really need to know how hardware works in depth, take a Python dev, he works with a very high level language and doesn't need to know very much how HW works.

@Dacexi lol, one could even write a ultra complex Python program without even knowing what RAM is. That's not my opinion, that's the reality. One can.

@samu i never said in depth

@Dacexi "how it all works and fits together" I assumed that you meant advanced knowledge. Sorry

Well there's a difference between high and low level programming. I just want to make a web server. I'm not so concerned about the data structures I use because the majority of the performance is the SQL queries.

@samu an understanding of how for instance functions are run by the processor will make the developer able to optimise its code for more speed during executing.

That really, but it sure helps when your tool isn't a black box.

honestly my stand on a situation like this is that it's completely dependent on your job. there are specialties that require deep knowledge of your hardware and there are some where that knowledge is more trivial.

it is good to take into consideration how well your application is running and perhaps how you can effectively optimize it but there comes a point when micro-optimization has no merit, but again that is solely dependent on the circumstances 😄