How does Computer Science teach the basics? Doesn't most of the CS curriculum assume a Turing machine with infinite tape?

At my university, most of the classes the GP is talking about (logic design, microprocessor implementation, OS-level programming) were in the Electrical Engineering curriculum. The lowest level that the CS curriculum got to was writing a parser for a programming language.

I learned about computer architecture in my CS curriculum. It seems there’s great variance to these courses, so it’s hard to assume your experience is the same everywhere. Mine had a good deal of practical applications, prefaced by theory. I know people who went to school and didn’t learn some “basic” things, that their curriculum didn’t prioritize.

As time goes by the topics to focus also changes (should we have Machine Learning courses now?), so that’s to be expected.

How can you call yourself a programmer if you don't know the basics?

If you're gonna skip education, you better make up for it by going above and beyond what they teach with your self-learning.

This sort of gatekeeping is the kind of reason why a lot of people are put off by engineers - "oh, you don't know X? You're clearly not a software engineer".

There's a reason abstraction layers exist, perhaps you should try and figure out why your mental model of software does not account for that.

Would you want the structural integrity of your house to be assessed by someone who wasn't taught the principles of stucture engineering?

Would you need the principles of structure engineering to assess that house's toaster?

Much like a house is more than just the structure itself, so is the realm of computers.

If only this was how it worked :(

From my experience a substantial fraction of programmers learn the absolute minimum to get a job.

Then they either learn on the job or ask the same questions over and over again, never learning. The latter being the really annoying people to work with.

OTOH, thank goodness for them or you wouldn’t find jobs so easily, nor would you command the salary you command.

You can be a perfectly good e.g. web developer without knowing any of that. It would be good to know how it works but you don’t need to go that deeply into it unless you’re interested in it. And if you are, or if you really do need to know it, this is a learning resource so you can do that

> How can you call yourself a programmer if you don't know the basics?

If you can write programs, then you're a programmer. That's it.

Some types of low level programming require you to know about CPU architectures and op codes, but certainly not all types of programming. You can be an excellent web dev without knowing how a CPU works, for example.

If you find yourself wondering this, the answers are in an undergraduate economics course. Please learn the basics ;)

Certainly not because the developer didn't learn all the x86 machine code mnemonics by heart.

How is that relevant? A computer architecture class explains the high-level concepts of an ISA and micro-architecture, covering features from across the domain.

There is never a strong focus on x86, and any kind of rote memorization has nothing to do in a higher education institution.

Because the developers are not using Chrome tools to profile their web apps, and they are not collecting performance metrics in production?

Some of the best programmers I know are self taught.

Often it's the case that those who learnt to program at college/university at the age of 20 are unsettled by their peers who at 30 have two decades under their belt, having spent their fertile years from 10 or earlier programming. By 20 I'd already been writing code every week without fail for a decade. Now I'm at > 70%.

And pages like this are the exact great resources that you can learn from. :)

How many people who call themselves "programmers" went through the basics?