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Poll: How many programmers don't know about bit-wise operations?

news.ycombinator.com

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Re: Poll: How many programmers don't know about bit-wise operations?

#11

Post by pjmlp »

jcr wrote: post #5
ColinWright wrote: post #2

Clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5506458

At the moment, the linked submission is sitting at 2 points. The default is 1 point, and I'm the +1 up-voter. People writing code should know these things, but the move away from learning real low level languages means many people never learn these things. NOTE: The "low level" languages are assembly, microcode, and machine code, but never C. In spite of claims to the contrary, C is a high level language. When employ…

Because 90% of all programmers don't do much than writing plain CRUD applications.

Re: Poll: How many programmers don't know about bit-wise operations?

#15

Post by rachelbythebay »

Looking at my recent projects, bitwise stuff seems to crop up when I'm dealing with binary data generated by someone else. Some of that is SmartNet trunking data - lots of weird bit-mangling happens in there. Sometimes it shows up when dealing with raw Ethernet frames. I also apparently used it to mask off all but the bottom 8 bits when creating some temporary hex identifiers with data from /dev/[u]random.

Otherwise, I'm ORing some flags together for some library call: libcurl, libxml2, plus bits of the C library like fcntl and open. Oh, and I guess I frob some termios bits sometimes to enable or disable echo for reading a password.

It doesn't come up often. When it does, it gets hidden down in some low-level utility function and then I build on top of that with something which doesn't try to be clever.

Re: Poll: How many programmers don't know about bit-wise operations?

#16

Post by philsnow »

I've found that people who list any of the following on their resume are way more likely to know how to bitwise their way out of a paper bag:

  - C (not "C/C++", those people generally mean "C++")
  - video codecs
  - compression of any kind
  - encryption / cryptography of any kind
  - embedded anything

Re: Poll: How many programmers don't know about bit-wise operations?

#18

Post by yareally »

jcr wrote: post #5
ColinWright wrote: post #2

Clickable: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5506458

At the moment, the linked submission is sitting at 2 points. The default is 1 point, and I'm the +1 up-voter. People writing code should know these things, but the move away from learning real low level languages means many people never learn these things. NOTE: The "low level" languages are assembly, microcode, and machine code, but never C. In spite of claims to the contrary, C is a high level language. When employ…

I agree that it does seem that less are probably learning bitwise stuff these days. Anyone that still goes the traditional route of taking Computer Science in school is still at least exposed to them though through taking an assembly/architecture course or two. I don't use them very often still despite having seen them in those courses, but every now and then I come across somewhere they might be useful.

Re: Poll: How many programmers don't know about bit-wise operations?

#19

Post by olalonde »

Are there any use cases apart from low level C/C++ where bitwise operations are really useful? I know they are available in Ruby, PHP, etc. but it seems to me that the performance/memory gain they offer is negligible compared to the loss in readability. The last time I remember using bitwise operations was when programming an ATmega16 microcontroller.
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