[pointernil]

- A little off-tangent maybe, but are there other professions where this kind of once important but today less important (as some claim) knowledge exists? Is this kind of "knowledge degradation" common in other industries?

- On a different note: how much of mem-space bloat can be attributed to this low-level neglect? Which of course is partly caused by modern languages / programming paradigms abstracting away this low level details for sake of higher level abstractions (which only seldom break, right ;)

- honorable exception: erlang bit-level pattern matching and all the power that comes with it. Btw. did any other language/lib even try to imitate that feature?