Personally, I think it’s possible to not encounter them. I surely avoided them for a while in my own career, finding them to be the tricks of a low-level optimization expert of which I felt little draw.
But then I started investigating type systems and proof languages and discovered them through Boolean algebras. I didn’t work in that space, it was just interesting. I later learned more practically about bits through parsing binary message fields and wonder what the deal with endianness was.
I also recall that yarn that goes around from time to time about Carmack’s fast inverse square root algorithm. Totally useless and yet I recall the first time I read about it how fun a puzzle it was to work out the details.
I’ve encountered them many times since then despite almost never actually using them. Most recently I was investigating WASM and ran across Linear Memory and once again had an opportunity to think about the specifics of memory layout and how bytes and bits are the language of that domain.
I've mostly done corporate Java stuff, so a lot of it didn't come up, as Spring was already doing it for me.
I've first got to enjoy low level programming when reading Fabien Sanglard breaking down Carmack's code. Will look into WASM, sounds like it could be a fun read too.
But then I started investigating type systems and proof languages and discovered them through Boolean algebras. I didn’t work in that space, it was just interesting. I later learned more practically about bits through parsing binary message fields and wonder what the deal with endianness was.
I also recall that yarn that goes around from time to time about Carmack’s fast inverse square root algorithm. Totally useless and yet I recall the first time I read about it how fun a puzzle it was to work out the details.
I’ve encountered them many times since then despite almost never actually using them. Most recently I was investigating WASM and ran across Linear Memory and once again had an opportunity to think about the specifics of memory layout and how bytes and bits are the language of that domain.