4 ms·

"Finding people who can do that are few and far between" When I was growing up, we had to learn assembly to do anything meaning full on a C64. And 64k is all

by vparikh 11y ago

"Finding people who can do that are few and far between" When I was growing up, we had to learn assembly to do anything meaning full on a C64. And 64k is all we had, and for the most part all we were ever going to get. How will the industry deal with people who can't hack/program at a low level? Its kind of scary when you have people with that much knowledge and experience leaving the industry. Especially one as young as ours. I always wonder what will happen with the next generations of programmers coming out of school - most of them get started with Python, Ruby or Java. And low level systems programming is mostly an after thought or an annoying class for most students. Congratulations to Mr. Zottarelli and a great and important career. And hopefully he will write a book about his work to help us along.

meric 11y ago
I had an ex-electrical engineering girlfriend who studied assembly as a core part of her degree. I think the low-level is covered more than you think, not in software engineering but in electrical engineering where the focus is on building platforms (transistors, CPU, Ram, hardware and assembly) to enable software to be written.
- Demiurge 11y ago
  Yes. Even part of my pretty standard CS curriculum included electrical engineering (breadboard to ALU), assembly (self hosted interpreter/vm) and language theory (C clone) courses. With a bit of time I or my classmates could build a computer from scratch, but the relevancy of this to my day job of many years as web and scientific programmer has been zero to minor. I think it gives me enough insight into many phenomena, but the lower, the less it is relative to making stuff actually happen for people. We are building up.
Demiurge 11y ago
With the growth of any science and industry, there is depth of specialization. The overall expertise is not decreasing, it is increasing, and the breadth has to give.
_fizz_buzz_ 11y ago
I don't think the problem is that they cannot find anybody who can program assembly in general, but they use a very exotic, old architecture with very limited memory. So someone has to learn this specific architecture with apparently limited documentation (and a google search won't cut it). And on top of that in a very unusual and critical application i.e. if you brick the processor you have a real problem. If this was e.g. a modern run of the mill ARM processor, you can find a lot of qualified assembly programmers.

by vparikh 11y ago

meric 11y ago

I had an ex-electrical engineering girlfriend who studied assembly as a core part of her degree. I think the low-level is covered more than you think, not in software engineering but in electrical engineering where the focus is on building platforms (transistors, CPU, Ram, hardware and assembly) to enable software to be written.

Demiurge 11y ago
Yes. Even part of my pretty standard CS curriculum included electrical engineering (breadboard to ALU), assembly (self hosted interpreter/vm) and language theory (C clone) courses. With a bit of time I or my classmates could build a computer from scratch, but the relevancy of this to my day job of many years as web and scientific programmer has been zero to minor. I think it gives me enough insight into many phenomena, but the lower, the less it is relative to making stuff actually happen for people. We are building up.

Demiurge 11y ago

With the growth of any science and industry, there is depth of specialization. The overall expertise is not decreasing, it is increasing, and the breadth has to give.

_fizz_buzz_ 11y ago

I don't think the problem is that they cannot find anybody who can program assembly in general, but they use a very exotic, old architecture with very limited memory. So someone has to learn this specific architecture with apparently limited documentation (and a google search won't cut it). And on top of that in a very unusual and critical application i.e. if you brick the processor you have a real problem. If this was e.g. a modern run of the mill ARM processor, you can find a lot of qualified assembly programmers.