I get the feeling that all of these assembly jokes are justifications to avoid learning assembly.

You can still make syscalls in assembly. Assembly isnt magic. It isn't starting from the creation of matter and energy, it's just very specific code.

Assembly code is for writing C compilers, and C compilers are for writing Lisp interpreters.

Assembly isn't that hard. It's the same imperative programming, but more verbose, more work, and more random names and patterns to remember. If you can understand "x += 3; is the same as x = x + 3", you can understand how the add` instruction works.

I wouldn't be able to write Rollercoaster Tycoon in assembly because keeping track of all that code in assembly files must be hell, but people pretending like you need to be some kind of wizard to write assembly code are exaggerating.

These days, you won't be able to beat the compiler even if you wrote your code in assembly, maybe with the exception of bespoke SIMD algorithms. Writing assembly is something only kernel developers and microcontroller developers may need to do in their day to day life.

Reading assembly is still a valuable skill, though, especially if you come anywhere near native code. What you think you wrote and what the CPU is actually trying to do may not be the same, and a small bit of manual debugging work can help you get started resolving crashes that make no sense whatsoever. No need to remember thousands of instructions either, 99% of assembly code is just variations of copying memory, checking equality and jumping anyway. Look up the weird assembly instructions your disassembler spits out, they're documented very well.

Look at mister fancy pants with and assembler.

How about entering straight opcode, operand with only a hex keypad and two pairs of 7 segment LEDs. You can only see one set of numbers at a time. You had to write it out on paper to be able to keep track and count positions so you don't use your spot.

I had to do this as a project in school. Two 8088 units that we breadboarded to a UART that we used to drive a fiber optic link to communicate with each other with a basic protocol. All descrete components hand wired and coded.

It made you tie all of skills together into a full system of hardware and software.

Assembly used to be a required course for CS undergrads in the 90s. Is that no longer the case?

Also we had to take something called Computer Architecture, which was like an EE class designing circuits with gates and shit.

IMHO assembly isn’t hard. When you gain enough experience you start to see „visual patterns“ in your code. For example jumping over some lines often equals to a if/else statement or jumping back is often a loop etc. Then you are able to skim code without the necessity to read each line.

The most difficult part is to keep track of the big picture because it is so verbose. Otherwise it’s a handful or two of instructions you use 90+% of the time.

I needed it often in the past in the PLC world but it is dying out slowly. Nonetheless, when I encounter 30+ year old software I’m happy to be able to get along. And your experience transitions to other architectures like changing from one higher language to another.

Nonetheless, if I’m able to choose, I’ll take Go. Please and thank you 😊

Anyone who thinks OP asking about Assembly with this meme should play the game Turing Complete. It's great. You have to design a computer all the way from the most basic logic gates (I think you only get a NAND gate to start), designing an ALU and CPU, creating your own machine language, and writing your own programs in the language you designed, and it's all simulated the whole time. Machine language is pretty advanced as far as things go.

It's now been 18 years since the last time an employer paid me to write assembly, but it's only been a year or so since the last time I had to read assembly at work (in order to verify what the compiler really was doing).

OS and embedded dev here. I use assembly all the time. I've even worked on firmware that was entirely in assembly of strict requirements that couldn't be met in C.

Also even machine code hides a lot about how the underlying machine works so if you really want to do computing from scratch you really do hate to invent the universe because there's abstractions all the way up the hardware stack just like there is in software.

Ha! I teach assembly and use this one every year to lighten the mood before midterms.

I remember watching assembly demos in the early-mid 90s and thinking those guys were wizards

Not exactly accurate, I think. Even machine language is bound by the CPU's architecture. You can't do anything in machine language that wasn't specifically provided for by the CPU architects.

It would be more accurate to say it's like creating a new universe using all the same laws of physics, thermodynamics, cosmology, ethics, etc as our existing universe.

I had an assembly class in college. I didn't love of at all. Got my first job after graduating and it was writing space shuttle engine control software, which was in assembly. I was kind of surprised at how fast it became natural after dealing with it full time. Still, it felt luxurious when we upgraded the controller and could do the software in C.

Syscalls are sitting right there, and you can always just link libc...

In college back in 1991. Also had to do PASCAL and FORTRAN but thankfully those two were in a single course.

Not since the 1980s on a Commodore 64.

SYS64738

I learned assembly for a few weeks when I first started a new job once (didn't even have anything to do with my job), and I always felt like my brain was tired after trying to write in assembly. Just took so much more mental concentration than writing in c for example.

Only on the VIC20 and Atari STe. On the VIC20 you had to write the assembler, manually convert it to machine code and enter that into the computer. There was a cartridge with an assembler, debugger and an extra 3.5Kb memory for it but I never got one.

Nah, I don't hate myself that much.

I've been studying Arm Aarch32 lately. I have a software development academic background but I have always been interested in Architecture.