Lazycoder

Know your platform

Working for The Man | Tux Deluxe: “Learn the architecture of the machine

Many programmers, especially those who write for virtual machines such as Java or the .NET CLI, think that low-level machine architecture and processor instructions don’t matter anymore. That’s still not true, and I don’t believe it ever will be. Someone who understands what the machine is really doing underneath all the modern layers of glop such as virtual machines, garbage collection algorithms, network and threading abstractions, will always be able to solve problems better than someone who lets the compiler or the ‘execution environment’ they’re using make all the decisions for them.”

I agree completely. At some point, you have to understand what the layers of abstraction you are using are doing to make your life easier. So when your life is hard, you have an idea about how to route around the hard parts.