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I really like the idea of teaching asm first for adults. I really didn't understand what I was doing in C until I'd learned assembly. I think it would be inte

I really like the idea of teaching asm first for adults. I really didn't understand what I was doing in C until I'd learned assembly. I think it would be interesting to have a college curriculum that started out in asm the first year, and eventually ended in a symbolic/lambda language like lisp.

rick_2047 17y ago
sir assembly at the first year would scare away people from majoring in EE or CS. I think C is much better than asm to start with. But if they want student can be given a choice to learn asm as a elective in the first year. A choice bases credit system comes real handy in such a situation.Also we can have the same course taught in asm and C and students can be given a choice to learn which ever they want. So we would have to conduct fewer separate classes if the course focus is on the theory of computation.
- nullproc 17y ago
  From the perspective of a CS student I can understand abstrating the computational theroy from the applied science of programming for a particluar ISA and agree with your point. A similar arguement can potentially be made for Software Engineering. However, if your discipline is EE or CE I'd have to disagree. Perhaps my educational experience and focus on embedded system design has distroted my view, but without starting with a basic understanding of computer and instruction set architectures I don't think I would have or could have been successful. Yes, assembly is tedious and modern compilers do a much better job optimizing for 99% of all cases. But knolwedge of computer architecture as well as an understanding of how to represent common high level program structures (if, for, while...) coupled with a basic understanding of stacks and how C utilizes them at runtime is nothing short of foundational. It is the kind of information that has allowed me to transition to from different platforms and high level languages with very little effort because they are all built upon the same principles. To be cliche about it, its simply learning to crawl before you can walk.
  - rick_2047 17y ago
    I personally parallel your views sir, and that too to a very great extent. But to a general high school student programming and computation is more about java and/or c++ or other such high level language. The bombarding the poor fellow with asm at the very first semester would be way too much for most of them. Not everyone is able to understand and appreciate the beauty in the functionality of asm. I do not wish to deny that this is the best way to put forth the world of CS but we must first understand is the student ready for it or not.
coliveira 17y ago
In my CS intro course at college, the professor started describing a very generic computer and its assembly language. Then he wrote simple programs with that language, to teach what was a loop, a condition, or a function call. Ever since, I used this simple model to understand every language I learned in college, such as C or Pascal.

rick_2047 17y ago

sir assembly at the first year would scare away people from majoring in EE or CS. I think C is much better than asm to start with. But if they want student can be given a choice to learn asm as a elective in the first year. A choice bases credit system comes real handy in such a situation.Also we can have the same course taught in asm and C and students can be given a choice to learn which ever they want. So we would have to conduct fewer separate classes if the course focus is on the theory of computation.

nullproc 17y ago
From the perspective of a CS student I can understand abstrating the computational theroy from the applied science of programming for a particluar ISA and agree with your point. A similar arguement can potentially be made for Software Engineering. However, if your discipline is EE or CE I'd have to disagree. Perhaps my educational experience and focus on embedded system design has distroted my view, but without starting with a basic understanding of computer and instruction set architectures I don't think I would have or could have been successful. Yes, assembly is tedious and modern compilers do a much better job optimizing for 99% of all cases. But knolwedge of computer architecture as well as an understanding of how to represent common high level program structures (if, for, while...) coupled with a basic understanding of stacks and how C utilizes them at runtime is nothing short of foundational. It is the kind of information that has allowed me to transition to from different platforms and high level languages with very little effort because they are all built upon the same principles. To be cliche about it, its simply learning to crawl before you can walk.
- rick_2047 17y ago
  I personally parallel your views sir, and that too to a very great extent. But to a general high school student programming and computation is more about java and/or c++ or other such high level language. The bombarding the poor fellow with asm at the very first semester would be way too much for most of them. Not everyone is able to understand and appreciate the beauty in the functionality of asm. I do not wish to deny that this is the best way to put forth the world of CS but we must first understand is the student ready for it or not.

coliveira 17y ago

In my CS intro course at college, the professor started describing a very generic computer and its assembly language. Then he wrote simple programs with that language, to teach what was a loop, a condition, or a function call. Ever since, I used this simple model to understand every language I learned in college, such as C or Pascal.