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This article is so blatantly fallacious I can't even get past the first couple of paragraphs. Perhaps it makes a stronger case later in the article, but the ear

This article is so blatantly fallacious I can't even get past the first couple of paragraphs. Perhaps it makes a stronger case later in the article, but the early claims it makes invoke Meltdown/Spectre, eg. speculative execution, and your CPU being more advanced than a PDP-11, and that C doesn't expose modern CPU features like speculative execution, therefore C is not low-level. But assembly doesn't either. You could attempt to make the claim that assembly is no longer a low-level language, but the article explicitly does not do this, instead listing assembly as the low-level extreme that C is being compared against. This is embarrassingly bad.

nizmow 1mo ago
I think that’s the point.
rfgplk 1mo ago
> C doesn't expose modern CPU features like speculative execution, therefore C is not low-level This is a 100% skill issue of the author, as is always the case. C does expose it fully, except it's implicitly implied by your code rather than explicitly declared. Same with all of the other arguments that always plague these type of articles.
- jact 1mo ago
  Can you elaborate? It’s “implicitly implied” by your code? How is that “exposing it fully” except in the sense that speculative execution is “implicitly implied” in all code targeting the relevant hardware?
  - Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
    Some C compilers include special interpretations of static and volatile to change how both the code is compiled and linked. It can be "low-level", but it depends how you define what that means in the age of microcode abstractions. Most people shouldn't write in C, but that is because their skills belong in Application user space. =3
mustache_kimono 1mo ago
> You could attempt to make the claim that assembly is no longer a low-level language, but the article explicitly does not do this, instead listing assembly as the low-level extreme that C is being compared against. The article mentions assembly once. But it's not an argument about how assembly is "low level" and C isn't, although it may sound like that, upon a first reading, given the article's contentious tone. The article is really an argument about how C programmers believe, and constantly state, that they are programming "close to the metal", but what they are really programming is a very fast PDP-11 emulator with lots of implicit behavior. Implicit behavior like speculative execution and asynchronous execution and lots and lots of caching.
- applfanboysbgon 1mo ago
  > The article mentions assembly once. But it's not an argument about how assembly is "low level" It is, though: > Think of programming languages as belonging on a continuum, with assembly at one end The article explicitly states that assembly is the end of the continuum, that it is the lowest of the low-level. Therefore, it is not making the argument that assembly is not low-level. But the exact same arguments it makes to distinguish C as not low-level can be applied to assembly. The entire article is based on a fundamental logical error.
  - mustache_kimono 1mo ago
    > The article explicitly states Again -- I think your impression is the result of the contentious tone of the article. Yes, the article explicitly states: "Think of programming languages as belonging on a continuum, with assembly at one end and the interface to the Starship Enterprise’s computer at the other. Low-level languages are “close to the metal,” whereas high-level languages are closer to how humans think." But then spends the rest of the article debunking this commonly held notion, specifically and explicitly re: C, but also implicitly re: assembly. See the very next section "FAST PDP-11 EMULATORS" "The root cause of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities was that processor architects were trying to build not just fast processors, but fast processors that expose the same abstract machine as a PDP-11. This is essential because it allows C programmers to continue in the belief that their language is close to the underlying hardware." The author obviously knows that assembly suffers from the same abstraction penalty. The author is saying, because C and processor design has been so tightly intertwined, we cannot program "close to the metal" because "the machine" is actually a very fast PDP-11 emulator. See also the section "IMAGINING A NON-C PROCESSOR", where the author explicitly discusses alternative processor designs (which would of course require new assembly languages!). The author is actually trying something like a reductio on your mental model. When the author states "Think of programming languages as belonging on a continuum", the author is really saying "This is everyone's impression, but ... when you look a little deeper you see the cracks (which are actually contradictions)."
aDyslecticCrow 1mo ago
> You could attempt to make the claim that assembly is no longer a low-level language Assembly expose instructions that C was never meant to work with. Compilers force C to do so anyway. If you had a compiler that converted 8086 x86 assembly to modern x86 or CUDA bytecode; I'd consider that pretty equivalent. LLMV intermediate representation is probably more low level (closer to the real compute model it runs on) than that theoretical 8086 x86 compiler.

nizmow 1mo ago

I think that’s the point.

rfgplk 1mo ago

> C doesn't expose modern CPU features like speculative execution, therefore C is not low-level This is a 100% skill issue of the author, as is always the case. C does expose it fully, except it's implicitly implied by your code rather than explicitly declared. Same with all of the other arguments that always plague these type of articles.

jact 1mo ago
Can you elaborate? It’s “implicitly implied” by your code? How is that “exposing it fully” except in the sense that speculative execution is “implicitly implied” in all code targeting the relevant hardware?
- Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
  Some C compilers include special interpretations of static and volatile to change how both the code is compiled and linked. It can be "low-level", but it depends how you define what that means in the age of microcode abstractions. Most people shouldn't write in C, but that is because their skills belong in Application user space. =3

mustache_kimono 1mo ago

> You could attempt to make the claim that assembly is no longer a low-level language, but the article explicitly does not do this, instead listing assembly as the low-level extreme that C is being compared against. The article mentions assembly once. But it's not an argument about how assembly is "low level" and C isn't, although it may sound like that, upon a first reading, given the article's contentious tone. The article is really an argument about how C programmers believe, and constantly state, that they are programming "close to the metal", but what they are really programming is a very fast PDP-11 emulator with lots of implicit behavior. Implicit behavior like speculative execution and asynchronous execution and lots and lots of caching.

applfanboysbgon 1mo ago
> The article mentions assembly once. But it's not an argument about how assembly is "low level" It is, though: > Think of programming languages as belonging on a continuum, with assembly at one end The article explicitly states that assembly is the end of the continuum, that it is the lowest of the low-level. Therefore, it is not making the argument that assembly is not low-level. But the exact same arguments it makes to distinguish C as not low-level can be applied to assembly. The entire article is based on a fundamental logical error.
- mustache_kimono 1mo ago
  > The article explicitly states Again -- I think your impression is the result of the contentious tone of the article. Yes, the article explicitly states: "Think of programming languages as belonging on a continuum, with assembly at one end and the interface to the Starship Enterprise’s computer at the other. Low-level languages are “close to the metal,” whereas high-level languages are closer to how humans think." But then spends the rest of the article debunking this commonly held notion, specifically and explicitly re: C, but also implicitly re: assembly. See the very next section "FAST PDP-11 EMULATORS" "The root cause of the Spectre and Meltdown vulnerabilities was that processor architects were trying to build not just fast processors, but fast processors that expose the same abstract machine as a PDP-11. This is essential because it allows C programmers to continue in the belief that their language is close to the underlying hardware." The author obviously knows that assembly suffers from the same abstraction penalty. The author is saying, because C and processor design has been so tightly intertwined, we cannot program "close to the metal" because "the machine" is actually a very fast PDP-11 emulator. See also the section "IMAGINING A NON-C PROCESSOR", where the author explicitly discusses alternative processor designs (which would of course require new assembly languages!). The author is actually trying something like a reductio on your mental model. When the author states "Think of programming languages as belonging on a continuum", the author is really saying "This is everyone's impression, but ... when you look a little deeper you see the cracks (which are actually contradictions)."

aDyslecticCrow 1mo ago

> You could attempt to make the claim that assembly is no longer a low-level language Assembly expose instructions that C was never meant to work with. Compilers force C to do so anyway. If you had a compiler that converted 8086 x86 assembly to modern x86 or CUDA bytecode; I'd consider that pretty equivalent. LLMV intermediate representation is probably more low level (closer to the real compute model it runs on) than that theoretical 8086 x86 compiler.