Surely the whole point of good system design is a set of logical abstractions, where you need to understand the logical model and not the internal details - as these are free to be evolved.
Of course performance matters, but surely having performance tests, rather than trying to second guess what the whole stack below you might be doing, is
1. more efficient
2. more accurate
3. more likely to detect changes in a timely way.
That's not to say, you shouldn't be curious and deep understanding isn't a good thing.
Just saying understanding inside-out the abstraction you are working with ( eg Java Memory Model ) it's performance characteristics ( from real world testing ) - is more important than some passing knowledge of real world CPU design.
This app I am using right now is in a webbrowser - not sure how understanding cache coherency helps in a single threaded javascript.
> Surely the whole point of good system design is a set of logical abstractions, where you need to understand the logical model and not the internal details
In my opinion an important part of being a good programmer is understanding - at least at a broad level - how the set of abstractions you're working on top of work.
At the end of the day, our job is making computer hardware operate on data in memory. The more that we forget that, and think about computing as some abstract endeavor performed in Plato's heaven, the more tendency we have for bloat and inefficiency to creep into our various abstractions.
In other words, I think it's better to think about abstractions as a tool for interacting with hardware, not as something to save us from dealing with hardware.
Of course performance matters, but surely having performance tests, rather than trying to second guess what the whole stack below you might be doing, is
1. more efficient 2. more accurate 3. more likely to detect changes in a timely way.
That's not to say, you shouldn't be curious and deep understanding isn't a good thing.
Just saying understanding inside-out the abstraction you are working with ( eg Java Memory Model ) it's performance characteristics ( from real world testing ) - is more important than some passing knowledge of real world CPU design.
This app I am using right now is in a webbrowser - not sure how understanding cache coherency helps in a single threaded javascript.