Comment by zahlman
1 year ago
> most posters advocating learning assembly language have never had to use it in a production environment... For the overwhelming majority of programmers, assembly offers absolutely no benefit.
I don't follow. Why should assembly have to be useful or pleasant in a production environment, for learning it to be useful?
I was taught a couple different flavours of assembly in university, and I found it quite useful for appreciating what the machine actually does. Certainly more so than C. Abstractions do ultimately have to be rooted in something.
You and the post you commented on display both a valid point. If we're talking about using assembly as a broad general purpose programming environment that would be a mess (which is precisely why it has no broad adoption). When we talk about assembly as a niché special purpose solution we would come to a different conclusion, coincidentally this is where assembly is still used today: environments where we need highly optimized code.
Your point about education is orthogonal to the point made. I agree with you that learning assembly can be a good way to teach people how computers work on a low level, but that has nothing to do with whether it is useful as a skill to learn.
As someone teaching similar things at the university level to a non-tech audience I have to always carefully wheigh how much "practically useless" lessons a typical art student can stomach. And which kind of lesson will just deter them, potentially forever.
> I agree with you that learning assembly can be a good way to teach people how computers work on a low level, but that has nothing to do with whether it is useful as a skill to learn.
I don't understand the distinction you're trying to make. The post I was replying to specifically discussed "learning assembly language". My entire point is that "learning assembly language" has purposes other than creating practical real-world programs in assembly.
Is it useful to learn bagpipes? I guess learning for its own sake is good, but if you want to join a band, guitar or keyboards are going to be a better bet and learning bagpipes first isn't going to do much for you.
Do bagpipes explain the mystery of sand performing calculations and taking actions? Do they give you an intuition for connecting how CPUs and memory accesses and cache hierarchies work with high level code, in such a way that you can start to understand why one version of code might be faster or slower than another?
If you can't see through field accesses and function calls to memory indirections, anything you might read about how TLBs and caches and branch prediction work doesn't connect to much.
Guess what, almost no one knows how to program in assembly and yet everything is working out pretty good.
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If a guitar was an abstraction layer that was implemented by low-level bagpipes then a) that would be awesome and b) guitar players would find their guitar playing to benefit from bagpipe lessons. At the very least they'd be able to understand and maintain their guitar better.
The connection is that they both play notes. You can play the same songs on both but no one wants to hear bagpipes.
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Learning the accordion didn't hurt Weird Al's career, nor did using the flute hurt Ian Anderson (lead vocalist and flutist of Jethro Tull).
These are edge cases. Way to miss the point.