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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

Not since the 1980s on a Commodore 64.

SYS64738

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

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.

I was pretty into x86 asm in my teens. Nasm was my go to. Anyone else ever play with MenuetOS?

Nah, I don't hate myself that much.

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.

From my understanding, one of the actual use case of assembly is for cyber security engineers to dump assembly instructions from a compiled program, so they can check for any potential vulnerability. I've also seen assembly included in an embedded codebase (the overall project is in C), which I assume is for more optimized performance and deterministic behavior