[_mocha]

I'm somewhat surprised to see this on the front page of HN. I distinctly remember this material being covered in a single lecture during our freshman CS course 20 years ago. I doubt this would've reached the front page in HN's early days, and it makes me wonder if we've moved away from teaching these fundamentals due to the heavy reliance on abstraction and ai agents in today's industry.

[asa400]

I've never taken a lick of CS in a formal setting, and I feel like that's increasingly common as programming has broadened its employment base. Most of the people I work with haven't done formal CS, either. Consequently I've had to learn all of this stuff on my own. There are communities out there that value education this kind of education. I can vouch for the Rust community, which has helped me learn _a ton_ about this kind of "lower level" stuff over the last 5 years despite starting my career doing Ruby.

[jerf]

One of the neat things about programming is that you can develop a high degree of skill in it without any formal education at all.

But it does mean that we've always had those programmers who have had characteristic holes in their education as a result.

Personally I enjoy having a mix of self-taught and formally-taught around; I think there quite a few things the self-taught are often better at than the formally educated as a group. I respect both sides. I'm just saying that there has always been a market for this sort of thing on HN because the self-taught have always been around.

[nomel]

> I think there quite a few things the self-taught are often better at than the formally educated as a group.

Would you mind expanding on this a bit?

[bigstrat2003]

I have a degree in CS from around the same time frame, and we never covered topics like this. So I think it varies widely, and is not necessarily a modern thing for people to not learn about struct sizing.