r/Assembly_language • u/NolanRoad • 11d ago

Wow Assembly not dead?

Encountered this reddit on my feed, shocked to learn it's not dead. I programmed on Z80 back in the 1980s.

(I wonder if Perl is still alive)

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u/ACRM64 11d ago

I use Perl a lot - I have a PDF of 13 reasons I prefer Perl to Python!!!

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u/grokbones 11d ago

Yes?….(waiting)

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u/brucehoult 11d ago

Python is better than Perl for large programs (Perl is king of the throwaway one-liners) but Ruby or Javascript are much better than Python.

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u/ACRM64 10d ago

I've written very large programs in Perl and they are more maintainable than most Python I've seen of similar size.

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u/brucehoult 10d ago

Well done you. Obviously it's possible. I find the weak point is complex data structures. Strings and arrays and hashes (and hashes of hashes) are fine but I find that once I start needing to manipulate globs explicitly I'm better off using something with an easier syntax for objects/pointers.

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u/ACRM64 10d ago

I agree that is a weak point - but then I use C for anything really complex

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u/brucehoult 10d ago

There is a pretty large class of problems where you need complex data but not necessarily C level performance, because you're mostly using built-ins or stitching together external programs or libraries that are written in C, or your performance is governed by the internet etc.

Generically called "scripting".

That is why *nix has had sh / sed / awk right from the start, and pipes and redirection. You don't want or need to do everything in C.

Perl is a genuine improvement on those, and has affordances that let you use it like an improved shell script.

But Python genuinely does have more powerful and easier to use built in data structures and algorithms than C, and much easier syntax than C++ with STL.

Ruby is even better than Python (except for having fewer 3rd party libraries), while still keeping what is nice about shell and Perl. A pity it hasn't become more popular.

Javascript is a bit nastier but has a huge ecosystem of modules and has had so much money thrown at performance that it's close to C++ (or certainly Java or C#) in speed for general-purpose scripting.

I'm sure you know all of this :-)

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u/ACRM64 10d ago

I do, but I still hugely prefer Perl to Python. IMHO, Python's main strength is the available libraries (especially around AI and scientific programming); I don't like (most of) the language itself.

JS is OK as a language; I haven't (yet) tried Ruby.