It's weird that "What every programmer should know about memory" Isn't on here. Even for languages that manage memory for you understanding the hard limitations and basic operations used to access and manipulate memory is certainly useful.
This is an excellent read, but I disagree with the title. It's a must-read for people interested in CPU architecture and for programmers who, after profiling, still consider doing micro-optimizations. E.g. if you seriously think about reordering your struct members for faster access. If you're building a web service, skip it.
I think it is a useful read for people doing any kind of programming at all, in that it might discourage them from attempting optimizations that seem obviously good, and might have _been_ good, if they were running on 20 year-old architectures, but these days just make the code more convoluted to no gain.
I know that this is the kind of effect the paper had on me (I spent a lot of time carefully reading it shortly after it was published), and now I almost never use what knowledge I gained from it to make performance optimizations, but it does frequently discourage me from attempting optimizations that I now know would probably not have the desired effect.
