I think you can argue for both sides of the argument, but what is the obsession for "the real"? Is the JavaScript running in your browser "less real" than the x86 Assembly that is compiled once again to Intel Microcode?[1]
> When I saw a memory address outputted to stdout, I felt that I was as close to the hardware that I could be without literally opening up my machine and stroking my ram modules like a crazy person.
Sorry to shatter your enthusiasm but the memory address you are seeing is very likely to be "virtual" and not physical thanks to paging: yet another damn abstraction![2]
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> "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." --Isaac Newton
The Magic of Software: How I Learned to stop Worrying and Love Abstractions
> "I think you can argue for both sides of the argument, but what is the obsession for "the real"? Is the JavaScript running in your browser "less real" than the x86 Assembly that is compiled once again to Intel Microcode?"
Because when the shiny abstractions and bloated frameworks layered like a Guinness World Record stack of pancakes† that attempt to hide all the underlying complexity of the hardware break down and leave you with a problem, be it CPU, memory, or I/O, then anyone without an understanding of what's going on at least at the assembly and architecture level will be up the proverbial creek without a paddle. I've made good money bailing people out of these kind of problems.
I think you can argue for both sides of the argument, but what is the obsession for "the real"? Is the JavaScript running in your browser "less real" than the x86 Assembly that is compiled once again to Intel Microcode?[1]
> When I saw a memory address outputted to stdout, I felt that I was as close to the hardware that I could be without literally opening up my machine and stroking my ram modules like a crazy person.
Sorry to shatter your enthusiasm but the memory address you are seeing is very likely to be "virtual" and not physical thanks to paging: yet another damn abstraction![2]
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> "If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." --Isaac Newton
The Magic of Software: How I Learned to stop Worrying and Love Abstractions
http://www.thecaucus.net/#/content/caucus/tech_blog/373
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[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Microcode
[2]: https://wiki.osdev.org/Paging