Eric M Russell (5/1/2015)
djackson 22568 (5/1/2015)
...I recall a discussion here regarding whether college is useful. This is an area where I think a good education is useful. Understanding why things run faster on the processor, slower in cache, slower still in memory, and almost at a dead stop on disk, helps you to more quickly identify low hanging fruit.
They teach that in college now? Taking a step back even further from system engineering, the most important thing I took away from college, what has benefitted me the most, was Critical Thinking. Any subject oriented knowledge can be leaned from a good book.
Now? Not sure. I went to a school that made an effort to employ professors who actually taught, and knew what they were doing. Also, before Windows one actually needed to have some idea of how things worked. While you can pick up a book (well order one...) that explains how a processor works, I don't know too many people who are going to do so unless it is part of a course that is required.
I think things really started going the wrong way around when java was released. I can just imagine the marketing people - "So you are telling me that you developed a language that is written for people who have no idea how a computer (processor) works, no idea how to manage memory, and will be an order of magnitude slower than every other language? Yeah, I can work with that. We'll tell everyone it is faster than assembly language, and that it runs the same everywhere!"
Dave