What is different with Python ?

[Roy Smith]

"Philippe C. Martin" <philippe at philippecmartin.com> wrote:
> Yet, many issues that a future software engineer should know are
> mostly hidden by Python (ex: memory management) and that could be
> detrimental.

I know I'm going out on a limb by asking this, but why do you think future 
software engineers should know about memory management?

I used to worry about register allocation.  Today, I don't even know how 
many registers any machine I work on has.  I used to worry about word size, 
and byte order.  I used to worry about whether stacks grew up or down and 
addressing modes and floating point formats.  Sure, somebody's got to worry 
about those things, but most people who write software can be blissfully 
ignorant (or, at best, dimly aware) of these issues because somebody else 
(compiler writer, hardware designer, operating system writer, etc) has 
already done the worrying.

There used to be a time when you had to worry about how many tracks to 
allocate when you created a disk file.  When's the last time you worried 
about that?