Okay. Defragging your disk prepares you to understand the concept of heap fragmentation later on in life. Understanding heap fragmentation and how to avoid it, how to compact segments, how to allocate smartly, allows you to write MUCH MUCH faster and higher quality software.
Today, there are a hundred thousand Zoomer developers spraying exabytes of poorly allocated objects all over the heaps of millions of production systems.
We frequently lament the fact that our standard Office applications run slower on 16 core, 4GHz machines than they did on a 66MHz 486DX, then we proceed to claim that the towers of abstractions we've built and the complete ignorance of the underlying hardware "doesn't really matter".
Most people who remember "defragging" have no clue what it actually does, and those that do have no problem understanding the issue of "heap fragmentation".
And if you think that developers below the age of 25 are the main reason your standard Office apps are slow, I wonder when you think that trend started and what the workforce building them looks like.
Same with everything else that's part of what's "understand how file systems work" means for users. It's an abstraction that tells you nothing about the underlying hardware - not to mention the underlying hardware having evolved quite a bit over the past few decades.
> Defragging your disk prepares you to understand the concept of heap fragmentation later on in life
uhhh no. Absolutely did NOT help me, or any of the people I know (many of which never got into tech, so don't even understand what a programming language is, let alone "heaps") :-)
Okay. Defragging your disk prepares you to understand the concept of heap fragmentation later on in life. Understanding heap fragmentation and how to avoid it, how to compact segments, how to allocate smartly, allows you to write MUCH MUCH faster and higher quality software.
Today, there are a hundred thousand Zoomer developers spraying exabytes of poorly allocated objects all over the heaps of millions of production systems.
We frequently lament the fact that our standard Office applications run slower on 16 core, 4GHz machines than they did on a 66MHz 486DX, then we proceed to claim that the towers of abstractions we've built and the complete ignorance of the underlying hardware "doesn't really matter".