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Irrelevance of language works if you assume PLs to be more consistent, or abstractly-used than they are.

As soon as you need to squeeze out more (or even a little) performance, you need to know how the implementation works under the hood.

As soon as the languages abstractions begin to leak, you need a knowledge of the languages quirks and tells.

It takes a while to develop this experience, and there isn't necessarily a great deal of overlap between PLs.




Even with implementations, there are consistent themes. L1 caches have been around aa very long time.


Sometimes knowledge like this is a little first-past-the-post, all-or-nothing.

Completeness of knowledge is key, especially when a chain of reasoning (debugging) is as strong as its weakest link. At these times, a false assumption based on how something works in some other language could really wrong-foot you. Being familiar with some language means it's faster to learn other languages that have similar implementations, but not assumed.




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