4 ms·

Mostly true but not fully. In the earlier days late 70s, mid 80s (even early 90s) working with assembly down was not uncommon, and often necessary. There wasn't

by xxs 3y ago

Mostly true but not fully. In the earlier days late 70s, mid 80s (even early 90s) working with assembly down was not uncommon, and often necessary. There wasn't such a clear distinction between the layers.

Rinzler89 3y ago
Because that's as high as SW abstraction would go back then, meaning it was relatively common (and a lot of times required) to be a true "full-stack" developer for almost any dev job. Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware. The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries. Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.
Ekaros 3y ago
Wasn't BASIC most popular language though? Which really was as high as it went.
- cyco130 3y ago
  But any non-trivial BASIC program had to include a few machine language subroutines here and there for speed. And people knew how to “hand-assemble” them without even an assembler.
- defrost 3y ago
  Popular as a "my first language" kind of thing .. not especially popular for making useful functional technical software. In the late 70s and 80s Assembler, Pascal, C, Fortran, Modula-2, Forth, Lisp were all used to create CAD, GIS, robot control, symbolic math, abstract algebra, etc. type programs.
oldsecondhand 3y ago
Yeah, but back then you had to pay $600+ for a C compiler.
raxxorraxor 3y ago
I think that also had to do with communication being much harder and internet ressources not being widely available yet since fewer had access to computer systems. Otherwise there probably would have been some popular synthwave script language that is optimized for vinyl storages.
- xxs 3y ago
  It has mostly to do with the extremely tight requirements. For instance nowadays the hashmap is the single most popular datastructure but it's rather memory intense compared to plain arrays (even when implemented via a backing array). Having enough memory changed the development process a lot. Apple II had 48KB for everything (incl. video buffer). Many things became a lot easier with the resource abundance like having flat memory model with the 32bit systems in a stark contrast via the segment switch on 8086.

by xxs 3y ago

Rinzler89 3y ago

Because that's as high as SW abstraction would go back then, meaning it was relatively common (and a lot of times required) to be a true "full-stack" developer for almost any dev job. Nowadays software is orders of magnitude more complex with layers and layers of abstraction and containerization to make app development and deployment as quick, easy, reliable and secure as possible, to expedite time to market and profit, that it's become unrealistic and unprofitable to expect your devs to be proficient across the whole stack from cloud, web, to kernel and hardware. The vast majority of average dev jobs nowadays are a lot more specialized and containerized, and companies mostly care about your ability to grind through the stack of CRUD Jira tickets to solve the business problems the company needs to make money, not dig through the Linux codebase to find some bug/race condition in the kernel/libraries. Outside of embedded/kernel dev and big-tech, where low level bug fixes and optimizations can translate to real $ at scale, jobs that need low level knowledge or that reward it, are very niche.

Ekaros 3y ago

Wasn't BASIC most popular language though? Which really was as high as it went.

cyco130 3y ago
But any non-trivial BASIC program had to include a few machine language subroutines here and there for speed. And people knew how to “hand-assemble” them without even an assembler.
defrost 3y ago
Popular as a "my first language" kind of thing .. not especially popular for making useful functional technical software. In the late 70s and 80s Assembler, Pascal, C, Fortran, Modula-2, Forth, Lisp were all used to create CAD, GIS, robot control, symbolic math, abstract algebra, etc. type programs.

oldsecondhand 3y ago

Yeah, but back then you had to pay $600+ for a C compiler.

raxxorraxor 3y ago

I think that also had to do with communication being much harder and internet ressources not being widely available yet since fewer had access to computer systems. Otherwise there probably would have been some popular synthwave script language that is optimized for vinyl storages.

xxs 3y ago
It has mostly to do with the extremely tight requirements. For instance nowadays the hashmap is the single most popular datastructure but it's rather memory intense compared to plain arrays (even when implemented via a backing array). Having enough memory changed the development process a lot. Apple II had 48KB for everything (incl. video buffer). Many things became a lot easier with the resource abundance like having flat memory model with the 32bit systems in a stark contrast via the segment switch on 8086.