Five Things that every programmer should learn

Prodigy with the computer is someone who can understand better how computers work. In older days, programmers had extensive knowledge because they had to back when computers had front panels with switches. They didn’t have the layers of IDE (Integrated Development Environments), optimizing compilers, Interpreters, and continuous integration to save their bacon. If they didn’t build it right from the beginning, it wouldn’t run at all. So, here are the top computer things that every programmer should learn,

Assembler

Most people younger than 50 can’t recognize a statement like move ah, 09h or camp tax, ex. Many probably think that computers naturally demand lots of curly brackets because the major languages use them to delimit blocks of code. Even those who understand that languages like Java or C must be translated into binary often have little to no experience crafting it.

Many older programmers spent their days writing assembler code, the name given to the human-readable version of raw binary machine code. Some could actually convert the assembly code by hand and turn it into hexadecimal bytes. The very best could then flip the toggle switches on the front panel to program the computers.

Sounds and lights

 A long time ago, a programmer told me he hated Unix. Why? He started out programming single-user microcomputers like the Altair or the Sol 20 that only ran one block of code at a time.

 “A Unix computer will start running something else at any time,” he told me. “You’ll hear the floppy disks start up and you’ll have no idea why.”

 This upset him because he was losing a powerful means of understanding what the computer is doing. No one really knows what’s going on in a modern computer. There are countless layers of software running on four or eight cores. Viruses and worms can live forever without the user noticing the lag.

 Bitbanging

  In the good old days, the programmers would pack as many as eight different Boolean values into one byte. They flipped the individual bits because they didn’t want to waste any of them.

 The modern data structures are incredibly wasteful. XML is filled with tags with long names, and each has a matching closing tag with an extra slash. It’s not uncommon to see modern XML files that are more than 90 percent fluff added to meet strict parsing rules.

 JSON is considered an improvement because it’s a bit smaller, but only because there are no closing tags -- just curly brackets. There are still too many quotation marks on all the tags and strings.

 Binary mathematics

  The operations for testing and flipping bits weren’t merely novelties for early programmers; they were necessities. Some operations were so slow that programmers had to look for any advantage they could find. The best was understanding that dividing by two was equivalent to shifting a binary number to the right, like dividing by 10 is the same as shifting a decimal number to the right.

 Shifting all of the bits is a standard operation on CPUs, and it was often blazingly fast compared to the basic division. The good programmers used this advantage to writing faster code that didn’t need to wait for multiplication and division when a shift could do the same.