alt Hacker NewsIs it useful to learn bagpipes? I guess learning for its own sake is good, but if you want to join a band, guitar or keyboards are going to be a better bet and learning bagpipes first isn't going to do much for you.
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strken • last Thursday at 1:18 AM
If a guitar was an abstraction layer that was implemented by low-level bagpipes then a) that would be awesome and b) guitar players would find their guitar playing to benefit from bagpipe lessons. At the very least they'd be able to understand and maintain their guitar better.
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spc476 • last Wednesday at 6:15 PM
Learning the accordion didn't hurt Weird Al's career, nor did using the flute hurt Ian Anderson (lead vocalist and flutist of Jethro Tull).
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Do bagpipes explain the mystery of sand performing calculations and taking actions? Do they give you an intuition for connecting how CPUs and memory accesses and cache hierarchies work with high level code, in such a way that you can start to understand why one version of code might be faster or slower than another?
If you can't see through field accesses and function calls to memory indirections, anything you might read about how TLBs and caches and branch prediction work doesn't connect to much.