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The article is yet another "religious" argument that doesn't really doesn't convince me about it's primary hypothesis: that you need to know the very low level basics to be a good / great programmer. This is no longer true in the current world with the higher level languages and different functional segments. The fact that I knew 3 different assembly languagues 20 years ago did help me understand what I could do with COBOL and FORTRAN program and why they worked, but has not improved my VB or JEE information systems. Do I care about 0xFFFF if I'm programming a financial application using BigDecimals? The fact that I know the 7 atomic operations that make all computer languages possible help me determine the best SQL to use?

Admittedly, there are applications--or isolated instances within other applications-- where you might need to know this stuff. More power to you if this is your world. But be open to the fact that there are a whole lot more applications where you don't.

why would someone need to know what is a big/little endian?

Passing binary data between platforms and systems, or reading legacy binary data? (are just two reasons why I use it)

Bloid, Glad someone knows! It really does amaze me how many idiot programmers out there that do not have a clue about the required basics, and the fact this article has had votes down shows that people would rather stick their heads in the sand rather than learn.