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> is a way to transmit concepts from one humans head to another (just like writing)

That's almost its primary purpose in my opinion... the CPU does not care about Ruby vs Python vs Rust, it's just executing some binary code instructions. The code is so that other people can change and extend what the system is doing over time and share that with others.




I get your point, but often the binary code instructions between those is vastly different.


The fact that we work with the high level languages rather than the binary code, despite all their inefficiencies, speaks to the human aspect being pretty important in the equation.


This entire conversation is about tradeoffs, but I would note that some of my favorite engineers that I've had the pleasure of knowing are: 1) very fast and 2) know exactly what the binary code of the thing they are trying to do looks like

There's a (3) where they'll quickly confirm their hypothesis using godbolt (or similar) if in doubt or they want to actually think in binary.

Fortunately for the programming community, many of us are able to create useful or interesting things without that kind of depth




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