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Is Assembly Programming Still Relevant, Today?
intelinsight asks: "Consider the following question given the current software development needs, and also the claims of the Assembly lovers for it being a language that gives one insights of the internal working of a computer. How relevant or useful is it to learn Assembly programming language in the current era? "
Nobody has to learn assembly language anymore to create piddly things like compilers or program ultra-small devices or anything like that. You can do all of those things with Ruby on Rails now.
Hire someone else to code in assembly.
Give me a moment. I've still gotta figure out the six nested timing loops I need to toggle the speaker cone in and out in such a way that it sounds like a cricket instead of a bird.
If they knew about big-O, they would have girlfriends, and by definition, could not be programmers.
I realize that assembly is very useful to know and can be useful in certain instances.
But writing in assembly has always given me the same feeling as eating rice with a single chopstick.
I stole this Sig
Nothing to CX here, MOV along.
Do it yourself, because no one else will do it yourself. [beta blockade 10-17 Feb]
I saw that Francisco - You're getting a special
version of the Computer Org test tomorrow.
One just for you.
Your computer org professor.
You are too thoughtful sir. Thank you! Did I ever tell you how fabulous I think IBM assembly language is? You know, it has all those wonderful registers (yes, all 16 of them, if you count those 4 or 5 registers that you can't use). Ah well, I should know better than to post on Slashdot with my name about a subject on the eve of that test. If you answer this, don't just answer "Indeed". :) Oh, and I know you're going to show this to class tomorrow. Hi his class. :)
Anyway, enough that's enough of me mongering around on /. for today. Time to work on Calculus. See you tomorrow. :)
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C1 bottles of beer on the wall. Take one down, pass it round... Oh, umm...
JMP GOAT_CX
> Real-time Raytracing (a myth, yes, but a good one nonetheless)
2005 called, they want their hardware back.
--
How can you understand Life if you don't even understand what happens after Death??
And if you're in physics, you should know math, and if you're in math, you should know Greek. :-)
One day won't there be little nanobots floating around with 512 bytes of memory and a 1 mhz processor that need to buzz around your body and eat up your precancerous cells?
Now I'm picturing something like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, only with ZX81s.
One of the best reasons to learn to do assembly programming is because it's fun.
;-)
Though I can't say that's why I did it. In my case (back in the early fourteenth century), we all wrote assembly code because that's how serious programming was done. Sure, we had COBOL to update ledgers and write reports, and FORTRAN to take the hard work out of maths computation, but for anything that really needed any kind of optimisation on those old core-memory machines, assembly was the only way to go.
There were other reasons too; I worked in a computer bureau with several Burroughs B3700 machines, and we had one or two clients for whose packages the source code had been long since mislaid.
So rather than re-writing the thing from scratch whenever mods needed to be made, a couple of us used to hack directly on the binary. It's not all that easy, but it's job security.
They stare at the code for a while, make wild guesses...
;-P
Sure. But that's only because "The C Programming Language [is] A language which combines the flexibility and power of assembly language with the readability of assembly language".
Xenon, where's my money? -Borno
Even the page you link to acknowledges the terms have been used interchangeably.
Pathman, Free (as in GPL) 3D Pac Man