astocko

Piggy backing on this comment. Agner Fog has some nice tables at http://www.agner.org/optimize/calling_conventions.pdf describing the register usage and calling coventions. Chapter 6 & 7

LOL @ Willarson's comment

Reading about ColdFusion stirs up feelings of nostalgia for me. I remember being a young teen interested in web application development and somehow I got my hands on the Allaire ColdFusion Web Application Construction Kit published by Forta and Que. None the less, that was a short lived experience (fortunately) and I had quickly moved on to perl.

I remember my first exposure to Lisp was in an introductory Artificial Intelligence class. The grad student taught the first lecture and was instructed to give us a basic overview of Lisp. The guy, who could barely speak English, gave us a tutorial that could've been entitled: "Lisp for Java Programmers".

It was probably a combination of the broken English and java-to-lisp examples he gave us that created a deep hatred within me.

It took me the better part of the semester to get my head around functional programming. I had to learn to think differently and look at problems differently. I'm now a happy Lisp hacker and I wouldn't trade it for anything in the world.

This was pretty interesting, though I specifically enjoyed this quote: "A lot of what Windows was doing early on was memory management, storage, all of the things today we take for granted," Hall said. "The vast majority of developers (today), they are not thinking, 'how am I going to store this particular piece of data in memory?' It just happens."

It might just happen, but it would probably be useful to know at least in principle how and why it happens. From my experience, a lot of developers have no clue whatsoever.