What is different with Python ?

[Philippe C. Martin]

I guess because I have mostly worked with embedded systems and that,
although I have always tried to put abstraction layers between my
applications and the hardware, some constraints still remain at the
application level: (memory, determinism, re-entrance,...). You will notice
that 99% of the embedded systems with realtime constaints use assembly,
C/C++, or ADA.

I agree with you and Peter though that these issues need not be treated on a
first course. Yet, and depending on the ultimate goal (John spoke of IT
versus CS) some of the newly trained folks should know about it. We could
not enjoy Python if no one were here to implement its VM, I have not looked
at the code, but I gather it is fairly complex and does require an amount
of "low level" skills.

Regards,

Philippe



Roy Smith wrote:

> "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?