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Comment by monk_e_boy | Hacker News Reader

I meet a lot of older developers who harp on about assembly and coding mainframes. Sure, it sounds wonderful, but they got fuck all done in a day.

You should pick JS, something server side (PHP, Ruby, Python, or Node.js) and react.

You'll spend a lot of time configuring libraries and services (webpack or webify) but that's just the way coding is these days. Anyone of us could code some assembler - like OP said, it's fun and easy. We teach our 14 years olds how to code assembler - it's that easy. You don't honestly think you can compete with those skills? You need to learn the hard stuff.

This is what you should do:

Learn all of the above Learn PhoneGap and cordova, use React to create an app. Pitch to companies to put an App out for their website. Use whatever server side tech they use (e.g. 90% of companies will be using PHP) to create a simple Web API for your app to call.

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> Anyone of us could code some assembler - like OP said, it's fun and easy. We teach our 14 years olds how to code assembler - it's that easy. You don't honestly think you can compete with those skills? You need to learn the hard stuff.

Aside from rest of the comments, this is such a ridiculous comment that I can't tell if it's a joke or not. Have you actually built anything meaningful with assembly language?

The language isn't particularly complicated, but with the assembly it's very easy to lose the sight of the forest for the trees.

I think that's why barely anyone uses raw assembly for any big pieces of code, unless they either have to (severe hardware constraints, lack of any compilers, or some specific needs) or want to challenge themselves. Higher level languages are there for a reason :)

That doesn't make this guy's comment anything close to true. It's like saying "Writing a piece of English literature is easy. All you need to know is alphabets. Really that's all you need to know." It is hard to express yourself using assembly, and like you said that's why there are higher level languages. Of course you don't need to know what a car is made up of in order to be a good driver, but it's idiotic to think the internal technology is simple.

Yes, exactly. I don't like analogies, but language and alphabet is a good one here.

No. But having met a few assembly coders over the years, every story seems to involve tons of work making something simple happen.

This guy wants a job. That pays money. Are we all going to tell him that assembler is the path to riches? Maybe for 1% of guys out there.

This just means you haven't met enough people. You probably met some people who worked on embedded systems where they only need to use a simple set of instructions predefined by the device. But imagine doing that for your laptop. Personally I learned assembly when I was into hacking operating systems (not as in the diluted 'hacker' notion people throw around nowadays for merely being able to write a simple html code, but as in actual 'hacking' to make the OS work in ways its designer had not intended) and from my experience it is the farthest thing possible from being simple. Teaching 14 year olds to write assembly code? Read up on my analogy above.

I don't want to get into a pointless internet argument. But I have been into schools and helped teach coding. Kids pick up assembler a lot quicker than other high level languages. But they are more productive in high level languages.

You can write complex systems in either. I'm sure we could both come up with examples of complexity all day.

"You'll spend a lot of time configuring libraries and services (webpack or webify) but that's just the way coding is these days."

Not all paid programming is like that. Desktop + expert software = stable platform, can focus on implementing features on top of existing stack.

I don't think the hard part is configuring libraries and services or anything like that. When needed, anyone with enough competence to read the docs and peek into the source code and do whatever's necessary.

The real pain is that those who had stepped on this road have to always run at the top of their lungs, trying their best to catch up with this giant hipster bandwagon. The language and frameworks change every other day, with old code rotting away at an astonishing speed. Not everyone's cut for this kind of pace.

There are other areas than webdev, where things are more stable without stagnation.

> I meet a lot of older developers who harp on about assembly and coding mainframes [...] but they got fuck all done in a day.

Except for making a JS engine that is fast enough to run your framework dujour.

All the leverage in high-level coding comes from the stability of the underlying layers. Even though those lower levels see less churn, we absolutely need people to maintain them, and these dev bootcamps certainly aren't churning out candidates who fit the bill.

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