3 ms·

Should they? Why? Look, I wrote assembly when I was a teen, went to school for CS twice and can't do squat with it today. I know it is ASM but beyond that it's

Should they? Why? Look, I wrote assembly when I was a teen, went to school for CS twice and can't do squat with it today. I know it is ASM but beyond that it's not that interesting or exciting to me. This person's job is strictly to build frontend web apps. Knowledge of assembly is largely ornamental to that pursuit. I'm not even sure someone getting as BSCS and MSCS would spend enough time with it to care. It's important, critically so for some people, but I wouldn't ding a job applicant for a node job for not recognizing it.

saagarjha 8y ago
I don’t think everyone who writes code needs to know how to write assembly, but I think it’s important to know that it exists and possibly what it looks like. Maybe not while you’re still learning to code, but once you’ve actually started working in the industry it’s a good thing to know, if only because it gives you a bit of context of how computers actually work.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  1) No, you only need to know about assembly language if you go for deep microoptimizations. 2) Assembly is vastly more high level than modern hardware, so much that most of those CISC instructors are broken into tens to thousands micro operations. It's not even close to any kind of machine architecture course. You will need that kind of deep knowledge to write optimal compilers which probably take (extended) C and not assembly language.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    Assembly (well, machine code if you want to nitpick) is still the representation of a program right at the interface between software and hardware. It's the processor's native API, no matter how many layers of additional abstraction behind that API. So it's a pretty important level of abstraction if you want to have a reasonable high-level idea of how a computer works.

3 ms·

Should they? Why? Look, I wrote assembly when I was a teen, went to school for CS twice and can't do squat with it today. I know it is ASM but beyond that it's

by nkozyra 8y ago

saagarjha 8y ago
I don’t think everyone who writes code needs to know how to write assembly, but I think it’s important to know that it exists and possibly what it looks like. Maybe not while you’re still learning to code, but once you’ve actually started working in the industry it’s a good thing to know, if only because it gives you a bit of context of how computers actually work.
- AstralStorm 8y ago
  1) No, you only need to know about assembly language if you go for deep microoptimizations. 2) Assembly is vastly more high level than modern hardware, so much that most of those CISC instructors are broken into tens to thousands micro operations. It's not even close to any kind of machine architecture course. You will need that kind of deep knowledge to write optimal compilers which probably take (extended) C and not assembly language.
  - Sharlin 8y ago
    Assembly (well, machine code if you want to nitpick) is still the representation of a program right at the interface between software and hardware. It's the processor's native API, no matter how many layers of additional abstraction behind that API. So it's a pretty important level of abstraction if you want to have a reasonable high-level idea of how a computer works.