In terms of memory usage it’s a waste. But in terms of performance you’re absolutely correct. It’s generally far more efficient to check is a word is 0 than to check if a single bit is zero.

My experience is that the programmers from the first row very much still exist. My theory is that the number of programmers from the first row stayed the about same or even increased slightly. There are so many more so called “programmers” overall now, however, that in relation the first row programmers are much rarer now. And to be fair, you don’t need a programmer capable of programming entire games in assembly to center a div.

No command line args, just change the global const and recompile

Nah, don’t use global variables, magic values everywhere. And don’t use const whatsoever, we need to move fast and break things, we can’t let something immutable stop us

That requires neither engineering-level math nor paper nor patience. All you need is the chain rule and some basic knowledge of sine and cosine:

The derivative of cos is -sin, but because of the 6x you get an extra factor 6. The sine function is periodic on 2pi, so sin(6*2pi + pi/2) = sin(pi/2) = 1. So the result is -36