Wrong. Every programmer should know this stuff. You may not be directly manipulating memory in python, but you should know enough about memory (and other scarce resources) to know when you need to optimize your application. How are you going to know when you need to use __slots__ in python? Should java programmers just blindly throw -Xms<size> when they think they need it? How should they justify that?

We have GB and GB of memory in our computers today, but all of the "I don't have to worry about memory constraints" have snowballed. The application we run today are nowhere near as efficient as they could be otherwise.