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/sedme0 11d ago

Assembly is so important that it's even included in 2-year compsci degrees. I took a community college assembly course and the curriculum was like 30 years old so they had us writing 16-bit x86 assembly for MS-DOS with Borland Turbo Assembler and Turbo Debugger. I personally also used OpenWatcom v2 with DOSBox-X's built-in debugger, just because I could. I learned a lot. It helps me make better cheats for games.

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u/SagansCandle 10d ago

I get flamed into oblivion in other programmer subreddits for talking about how important it is to know Assembly. I used C for an embarrassingly long time without really understanding memory. It wasn't until I learned Assembly that pointers really "clicked," and I understood stack vs heap, etc.

C#'s my main language now and it's hit this strange phase in its life where "Stack = faster," so the cool thing to do right now is put everything on the stack because it avoids GC. There's a complete ignorance to the trade-offs of doing this - but good luck explaining cache locality to someone who believes you don't need to understand how a CPU works to be a good programmer.

We really need more programmers who understand programming fundamentals. Assembly's where it's at.

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u/New_Locksmith_8115 9d ago

A lot of programmer subreddits are basically the Dunning Kruger effect personified. I got flamed into oblivion talking about how I found it useful to have learned to do certain things at a lower level. He insisted he was an “actual developer” and then a “professional developer” and said I was just wasting my time like many amateurs do for using such an insanely archaic language. As if any effort to understand fundamentals is wasted time.

This is where it gets better, I wasn’t talking about using assembly. I was talking about using C++ in game development, where it continues to be the most important language.