Here, the author bangs on about how you can't be a real programmer unless you know how the hardware works. What a lot of
codswallop! I don't know anything (well not much anyway) about the hardware and I'm a real programmer.
What makes me a real programmer? The fact that I solve real business problems for real people in the real world. So why don't I care about the hardware? Simple, because if I'm using Smalltalk or Python my code's portable across chipsets and operating systems.