Comment by mwkaufma
13 hours ago
"Assembly is Brutal"
Counterpoint: I picked it up in high school and I was Not That Bright(tm).
Certainly, some complex instruction-set extensions or sprawling SIMD mnemonics are more challenging that what I was reading in the 90s, but the boogie-man status of assembly is greatly overstated.
The final thesis, that we can-and-should let LLMs micro-optimize assembly into non-statically-verifiable gibberish to save an instruction stacks misunderstandings on top of misunderstandings. Just vapid gold-rush cheer-leading from Wired.
I picked it at the age of 11 years old or thereabouts.
Somehow it got fantasized as being hard.
I would go a step further, eventually we might be able to compile directly from high level prompts into Assembly instead of the high level languages like everyone is doing now.
It is the new coming of CASE tools, just needs to mature a bit more, lets see how far this AI cycle goes.
Re your counterpoint, learning to write small extremely toy programs in assembly isn’t hard. But using it to write bug-free programs with non-trivial functionality is much more difficult.
Generally, people aren't writing programs with non-trivial functionality in assembly; they're writing very small, hyper optimized functions that get called by some higher level language.
Exactly ^^^ I taught myself assembly on my Commodore 64. However, I only used it for certain tasks that were suboptimal with Commodore's BASIC and 64K of RAM.
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Yeah it's all shit and giggles until you need to allocate memory and handle it. Or when you need to use vector instructions or some CPU-specific stuff. Then you start understanding why people call it nightmarish