>Understanding this subject is very important in my opinion, this is one of the foundational things we do. Attaining a comfort level with compiler engineering is one the two or three things anyone can do to really "level up" as a software developer.
I think it depends on the level of abstraction.
Then again, I'm not really a software developer, most of the work I do is scripting stuff for data analysis, which is where I learned regex from. I did learn C in college which I somehow got fascinated with, but I never really do any serious work with it. Still, over time, reading about quite lower level stuff (compared to what I do) does seem like it helps take the mystery out of things like unintuitive behaviors with multiple references to a Python list (I suspect it was pointers all along). Taking it to the next lower level with studying compilers and how assembly gets generated doesn't seem like it will benefit me much more.
Still, I do like C enough to possibly consider doing something in it for fun if I get an idea, so maybe one day I'll come back to this.
I think it depends on the level of abstraction.
Then again, I'm not really a software developer, most of the work I do is scripting stuff for data analysis, which is where I learned regex from. I did learn C in college which I somehow got fascinated with, but I never really do any serious work with it. Still, over time, reading about quite lower level stuff (compared to what I do) does seem like it helps take the mystery out of things like unintuitive behaviors with multiple references to a Python list (I suspect it was pointers all along). Taking it to the next lower level with studying compilers and how assembly gets generated doesn't seem like it will benefit me much more.
Still, I do like C enough to possibly consider doing something in it for fun if I get an idea, so maybe one day I'll come back to this.