"Trying to be a programmer without understanding how a CPU works is like trying to practice medicine without learning anatomy.

While at some level that's still true, it's certainly less true these days than it once was. That's at least partially—and maybe mostly—due to the ubiquity of high level languages. Since this is Perl Monks, it seems relevant to point out that your Perl code will run unaltered on all manner of CPU architectures.

The other side to the coin is that trying to be a programmer without an understanding of how various (mostly) theoretical machines work is like trying to practice medicine without ever learning anything about biology. You don't see many real live Turing machines around, but an understanding of them will do a lot more for you programming than an understanding of "Hyper-Threading Technology" will.

-sauoq
"My two cents aren't worth a dime.";