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Is learning any sort of Assembly language a good investment of time? Is that time better spent more usefully studying other topics that help solve interesting p

Is learning any sort of Assembly language a good investment of time? Is that time better spent more usefully studying other topics that help solve interesting problems? Are there interesting problems that require knowledgeable of Assembly language to solve? Would Dijsktra, for example have adviced teaching for or against teaching Assembly language?

sandruso 4y ago
Understanding lower levels can be satisfying for certain type of people. I find it very useful when you can reason about stuff that is mostly invisible to other people. But if you are building web apps then this stuff is 95% useless as you can’t leverage the knowledge because web apps are much higher level. If you are curious about this stuff definitely look into it. It may be worth to you.
- billfruit 4y ago
  Not just web apps, isn't most of assembly language just incidental details? Is it fundamental knowledge? I doubt.
  - nottorp 4y ago
    Most is details you don't need. However knowing how a function call works, what kind of branching is available and how to do basic operations with collections (arrays or more) at the assembly level will allow you to write more efficient code in higher level languages.
  - sandruso 4y ago
    It is fundamental knowledge, but you can skip it thanks to higher levels of abstraction. In the end everything is just bunch of ones and zeroes and clever hardware architectures. Nand2tetris is great source for figuring out whether this is something you want to get in to.
flohofwoe 4y ago
Any sort of serious optimization work may require mulling over disassembly listings of compiler output (at least after you've exhausted the 'simple' high level optimization options).
DiscoDays 4y ago
> Is learning any sort of Assembly language a good investment of time? Learning to understand Arm architecture specifically or computer architecture in general can be invaluable. A particular Assembly syntax is just a way of expressing what you want to do. I would suggest reading a book about computer architecture or taking a course. And if you are like me and are interested in what complicated things hardware does to fulfil the needs of software, you might want to first read a book on operating systems (like OSTEP by Arpaci-Dusseaus, which is marvel of accessibility and challenge for students), because it will make you ask relevant question.
rramadass 4y ago
>Would Dijsktra, for example have adviced teaching for or against teaching Assembly language? Dijkstra makes a distinction between Computing Science and Computer Engineering. The former is the Theoretical Science part i.e. Mathematical Logic, Automata, Algorithms, Computability, Complexity etc. The latter is the design of practical machines where we can realize the running of algorithms from the former domain. Dijkstra did both but his interests/focus were more in the former domain. However, he called the General-purpose Computer "A Radical Novelty" from the pov that it allowed us to do any computation that we can think of (subject to Mathematical limitations/Computability) unlike any other previous man-made inventions. Many of his EWDs talk about this. Given that Assembly language is the native language of a Computer and all Higher-level language abstraction constructs have to map to it there is great value in learning the structure of Assembly language and how to program using it. There is also the beauty of Engineering involved, where layers of abstraction come together in a harmonious manner to give you a Machine with almost limitless capabilities. Also note that Assembly language is the Computer Architecture view for a Programmer while Computer Organization is the engineering implementation of it. The following two books are highly recommended for further understanding: 1) Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. 2) Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum.
- tengwar2 4y ago
  A minor niggle there: machine code is the native language of the computer. Assembly language is a slightly higher-level and slightly less expressive language. Most of the time, they can be seen as equivalent, but as a trivial example, a generation of us had to DB Z80 opcodes when using an 8080 assembler. More practically, things like breakpoints have to be set by writing binary to memory - there is no assembly language involved. At a less practical level, you can have things like self-modifying code, or code where the meaning changes depending on what byte offset you start.
microtherion 4y ago
Writing assembly language is a rather specialized skill that few people need to master nowadays. Being able to read it, on the other hand, I find really useful for debugging. You can follow execution into places where you don't have code at hand, find code that was not translated the way you expected (e.g. due to surprising aggressive optimizations), etc.
anta40 4y ago
>> Are there interesting problems that require knowledgeable of Assembly language to solve? If you find reverse engineering interesting, at minimum being able to read assembly is a must. I only learn assembly for fun, e.g writing SNES/Sega/Atari games. As a mobile application developer, obviously assembly is practically useless for work.

sandruso 4y ago

Understanding lower levels can be satisfying for certain type of people. I find it very useful when you can reason about stuff that is mostly invisible to other people. But if you are building web apps then this stuff is 95% useless as you can’t leverage the knowledge because web apps are much higher level. If you are curious about this stuff definitely look into it. It may be worth to you.

billfruit 4y ago
Not just web apps, isn't most of assembly language just incidental details? Is it fundamental knowledge? I doubt.
- nottorp 4y ago
  Most is details you don't need. However knowing how a function call works, what kind of branching is available and how to do basic operations with collections (arrays or more) at the assembly level will allow you to write more efficient code in higher level languages.
- sandruso 4y ago
  It is fundamental knowledge, but you can skip it thanks to higher levels of abstraction. In the end everything is just bunch of ones and zeroes and clever hardware architectures. Nand2tetris is great source for figuring out whether this is something you want to get in to.

flohofwoe 4y ago

Any sort of serious optimization work may require mulling over disassembly listings of compiler output (at least after you've exhausted the 'simple' high level optimization options).

DiscoDays 4y ago

> Is learning any sort of Assembly language a good investment of time? Learning to understand Arm architecture specifically or computer architecture in general can be invaluable. A particular Assembly syntax is just a way of expressing what you want to do. I would suggest reading a book about computer architecture or taking a course. And if you are like me and are interested in what complicated things hardware does to fulfil the needs of software, you might want to first read a book on operating systems (like OSTEP by Arpaci-Dusseaus, which is marvel of accessibility and challenge for students), because it will make you ask relevant question.

rramadass 4y ago

>Would Dijsktra, for example have adviced teaching for or against teaching Assembly language? Dijkstra makes a distinction between Computing Science and Computer Engineering. The former is the Theoretical Science part i.e. Mathematical Logic, Automata, Algorithms, Computability, Complexity etc. The latter is the design of practical machines where we can realize the running of algorithms from the former domain. Dijkstra did both but his interests/focus were more in the former domain. However, he called the General-purpose Computer "A Radical Novelty" from the pov that it allowed us to do any computation that we can think of (subject to Mathematical limitations/Computability) unlike any other previous man-made inventions. Many of his EWDs talk about this. Given that Assembly language is the native language of a Computer and all Higher-level language abstraction constructs have to map to it there is great value in learning the structure of Assembly language and how to program using it. There is also the beauty of Engineering involved, where layers of abstraction come together in a harmonious manner to give you a Machine with almost limitless capabilities. Also note that Assembly language is the Computer Architecture view for a Programmer while Computer Organization is the engineering implementation of it. The following two books are highly recommended for further understanding: 1) Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. 2) Structured Computer Organization by Andrew Tanenbaum.

tengwar2 4y ago
A minor niggle there: machine code is the native language of the computer. Assembly language is a slightly higher-level and slightly less expressive language. Most of the time, they can be seen as equivalent, but as a trivial example, a generation of us had to DB Z80 opcodes when using an 8080 assembler. More practically, things like breakpoints have to be set by writing binary to memory - there is no assembly language involved. At a less practical level, you can have things like self-modifying code, or code where the meaning changes depending on what byte offset you start.

microtherion 4y ago

Writing assembly language is a rather specialized skill that few people need to master nowadays. Being able to read it, on the other hand, I find really useful for debugging. You can follow execution into places where you don't have code at hand, find code that was not translated the way you expected (e.g. due to surprising aggressive optimizations), etc.

anta40 4y ago

>> Are there interesting problems that require knowledgeable of Assembly language to solve? If you find reverse engineering interesting, at minimum being able to read assembly is a must. I only learn assembly for fun, e.g writing SNES/Sega/Atari games. As a mobile application developer, obviously assembly is practically useless for work.