Is it necessary to understand what's happening at the hardware level to be a good programmer?

Posted by bev on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by bev
Published on 2011-10-17T22:23:47Z Indexed on 2012/11/18 5:18 UTC
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self-improvement

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Hardware

I'm a self-taught programmer, just in case this question is answered in CS 101. I've learned and used lots of languages, mostly for my own personal use, but occasionally for professional stuff.

It seems that I'm always running into the same wall when I run into trouble programming. For example, I just asked a question on another forum about how to handle a pointer-to-array that was returned by a function. Initially I'm thinking that I simply don't know the proper technique that the designers of C++ set up to handle the situation. But from the answers and discussions that follow I see that I don't really get what happens when something is 'returned'.

How deep a level of understanding of the programming process must a good programmer achieve?

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