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Comment by klohto | Hacker News Reader

Is assembly not common knowledge anymore?

It's interesting how many people would not recognize assembly language if shown a sample. In a way that is a statement as to how far compilers have come, that it is possible to produce perfectly good software that runs fast enough that only a limited number of people still has to know about the details of the underlying processor.

And in the case of interpreted languages or JIT'd languages the lines get blurred a bit more but even there it is clear that whoever uses say 'numpy' does not need an understanding of the underlying operations to get through their working day.

Higher levels of abstraction translate into higher productivity, in ever more rare cases it is worth breaking open those black boxes to go to work on the underlying plumbing.

Now I'm wondering if there are frontend devs who don't know where the name "WebAssembly" comes from...

If IT person doesn't know even the general looks of assembly code then something is wrong with the education. For non-IT that's another topic

lots of 'programmers' don't even know what a debugger or a cpu is xD let's not talk about common knowledge in 2018 please its depressing :D

Last week I had to explain to an IT guy what a tractor feed printer is. He'd never heard of "tractor feed."

ASM is arguably not obsolete technology, while tractor feed pretty clearly is.

I'm not even sure if C is.

In the parents defense 'assembly' isn't one thing. Every assembler has a different syntax, as does every chip family. The parent might be a master of 6502 ASM. And as that XKCD comic says. Everyone has to learn even the most obvious thing for the first time at some point.

I admit my experience is limited, but there are few things that should immediately identify some code as assembly to someone with previous experience, regardless of the platform, such as the prevalence of the "mov" command, a "jump" command or the use of registers, using memory addresses as parameters, accssing stack using "push" and "pop" commands.

Registers might have different names depending on the platform, actual command names may vary, but I would be surprised to see non-obscure platforms for which the pattern above is not valid.

I suppose my gp wasn't very clear. Language in this context could be just ASM or it could be intel x86 DOS ASM. As I said, the gp could be a master of 6502 ASM, but not be able to tell the difference between ARM and X86.

The question is whether it's recognizable as assembly at all rather than which specific flavor. I think it's correct that all assembly flavors tend to look very similar to each & very dissimilar from any language.

Hm... If you know one assembly you can easily recognize when it is assembly, even if you don't know the specific architecture.

I'm the worst type of bootcamp web developer you can imagine.

I only knew it was Assembly because i once looked at the apollo guidance computer's source code.

Not if it is your first time seeing assembly.

Doesn't that then imply that you don't know assembly?

Blargh, I somehow read that as "if you don't know assembly" instead of "if you know one assembly".

The syntax is different but the structure (or... lack thereof) is almost always the same (excluding the "edge cases" like highly-macroised code.) Asm looks like a step-by-step list of instructions, which is exactly what it is.

Confusing Asm with early (GOTO-only) BASIC, on the other hand, would seem far more common to me.

https://xkcd.com/1053/

This applies to general public but someone with Freelance Web developer based in Amsterdam. Mostly Node and React. in their bio should probably know what Assembly is...

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.

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.

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.

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.

Why? Serious question. Nothing about that bio says “this person should know about the existence of assembly” to me.

And besides, with their question they’ve made an effort to learn about it so I don’t see any reason to criticize them for not knowing. It’s like the xkcd referenced says, every day there are a bunch of people hearing about something for the first time. We should be happy that they hear about it!

Really? A programmer of any stripe who doesn't recognize assembly just seems like a very wrong thing. One wonders what their mental model of the computer is like.

I imagine that most people abstract at the levels above and below assembly languages. E.g. they know about high level languages, and that a CPU cannot directly run that, but their view of the lower level probably does not include any human readable artifacts such as latin characters but rather binary and voltages.

We have web pages with multiple seconds of latency because devs don't have a deep understanding of the performance hits of composing programs. And for that you need to understand how the CPU works.

I do not believe that knowing ASM would even remotely translate into the ability to optimize web pages for latency: understanding high-level concepts like TLS, HTTP/HTTP2, and being to understand JS engines seems far more applicable.

You also seem to be making the assertion that you cannot understand how a CPU works without knowing ASM, which seems equally spurious.

ASM is fairly useless knowledge for that problem, unless you go in the deep weeds of internals of your JS interpreter.

There is a significant portion of developers ( particular web and app ) and IT staff who never studied computer science in college but instead moved into programming/IT mid career. Most of them probably never heard of or seen assembly code.

However, I would be shocked if anyone who went through a CS program wasn't aware of assembly programming.

CS tends to be algorithms not low level programming. Unlike say robotics or electronics.

Even so, don't most CS departments have an assembly class? Or maybe get introduced to it in a Computer Architecture class?

CS usually includes classes on compilers, at least that's where I learnt some assembly

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