Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> This whole thing started when I was working with a guy named Kevin. He was 
> an OK programmer, but I kept having to bail him out of corners he'd painted 
> himself into.  At one point, he had a big complicated way of keeping track 
> of where he was in a network protocol, using strings with stars and plus 
> signs and zeros and such to track what messages he'd seen and such, and I 
> said "why not just use a state machine?"  He said "What's a state machine?"

  The only places I have heard where they use state machines is in formal
verification apps and regular expression interpreters. But I suppose there
are tons of other places where they are useful as well... :)

> >   Unicode encodings? Certainly useful to know. Basic SQL knowledge? Can
> > become handy sometimes even in jobs not directly related to databses.
> > Knowing what a TLB is and how it works? Exactly where do you need to know
> > that? It's not like knowing that would change the way you develop programs.

> As I said, these are to assess your breadth of knowledge. It's like asking 
> someone to write a program to compute prime numbers - you'll never have to 
> do that at work either.

  But I think there's a big difference between knowing how to calculate
prime numbers and knowing how virtual paging works at hardware level
(which is completely transparent to everyone except maybe operating system
developers).

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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