> These days, there are Java programmers who get that "deer in headlights" look when confronted with terms such as "cache line miss".
Forget that, most of these folks can't reason about a program that doesn't have automatic garbage collection. Even if they have direct experience with C or similar, I have asked recent grads how they imagine reference counting or malloc/free works, and they very often start pulling out GC-influenced magical thinking about "the system" reclaiming things under the covers.
Forget that, most of these folks can't reason about a program that doesn't have automatic garbage collection. Even if they have direct experience with C or similar, I have asked recent grads how they imagine reference counting or malloc/free works, and they very often start pulling out GC-influenced magical thinking about "the system" reclaiming things under the covers.