Nixers Book Club - Book #5: Computer Science from the Bottom Up - Community & Forums Related Discussions

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ckester
Nixers
Basic CS stuff, yes, and presented briskly like a refresher. It's good to go back and revisit these things now and then, to fill in any gaps in our understanding.

I really liked its beginning with the concept of abstraction, which is a much deeper topic than it might seem at first glance.

It reminded me, for example, that our abstractions can sometimes drift out of contact with the underlying reality, as this Usenix talk discusses: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36myc8wQhLo

TLDW: our programming model of the computer doesn't reflect the prevalence of SOC's and thus the presence of more processors -- and their firmware -- than found in the classic CPU. This can result in vulnerabilities. Fast forward the video to 19:29 for an example.

People have also often pointed to von Neumann architecture as another example of a limiting abstraction.

And functional programming polemics often describes OOP's emphasis on objects as the "wrong" abstraction.


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RE: Nixers Book Club - Book #5: Computer Science from the Bottom Up - by ckester - 21-08-2021, 01:58 PM