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Comment by amichail | Hacker News Reader

Plus, it was delightful to program.

Simple maybe, but not delightful to program. I don't know of any assembly language that is delightful to program.

BTW, I knew someone from junior high & high school who could write code for the 6502 using a hex dump with amazing speed. You might have heard of him: Randy Linden.

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I've written a lot of ARM assembler, and I think that could be described as a delight to program. An orthogonal instruction set, consistent naming, conditionals on every instruction, and a decent number of registers make it really quite pleasant (as these things go).

These days I'm writing a lot of code in Ruby and JavaScript on the JVM, and find myself considering Java my current equivalent of assembly. It's sad really, being so far away from what the CPU is actually executing.

6502 assembly was the first language after Apple Basic that I learned. I found it to be a very enjoyable experience. These days it would be tedious, but back then it was fun making the limited hardware do something and the only thing you used is what the hardware gave you. Today we have it lucky... with all the frameworks, libraries, and such only a small percentage of the end result is your original work. That's great for efficiency, though the downside is you can't point to a program and say that you wrote 100% of it.

I imagine this is similar to how someone who likes to tinker with engines might prefer an old motorcycle they can take apart and put back together themselves even though there are many advantages in terms of reliability, efficiency, comfort, and so on to driving a Prius.

As Doug McIlroy (inventor of pipes, diff) once said of punched cards, "It's the kind of thing you can be nostalgic about, but it wasn't actually fun."

http://research.swtch.com/2008/04/computing-history-at-bell-...

Punch cards are different: there's substantially delayed gratification.

When you're a poor college student as I was, entering opcodes in a monitor/debugger you wrote in BASIC because you couldn't afford an assembler, then yes, assembly was fun.

Fun, that is, until you had to hand-calculate negative jump offsets. Don't remember why, but for some reason I seem to think that the MC6809 I was running on made it difficult to do so.

There must have been something special about the 6809 - I recall doing my Digital Design course on that Chip. And yes, we didn't have an assembler, everything was entered via opcodes either. It was a very enjoyable experience for someone like me who wasn't a gear head, and got to play around with SB555s, NAND Gates, and lots, and lots of wirewrapping.

Heh, yeah I still remember 6502 opcodes... 4C xx xx is jmp absolute, 20 xx xx is jsr (jump subroutine) absolute, A9 xx xx is load accumulator absolute, 8D store accumulator, 60 is rts... I could go on.

Typing shit in to the hex monitor for a few years will do that :)

A9 xx xx is load accumulator absolute

Make that A9 xx; The 6502 accumulator is 8 bits.

Thanks for the correction, you're right A9 is load immediate I was mixing it up with AD xx xx which follows as 8D is the equivalent store.

I wasn't saying that the accumulator was 16 bit though, rather that the load is from an absolute 16 bit address.

Studying the manufacturers data sheet for the chip you could in a short time know everything, and I mean everything, about the instruction set. You would never have any doubt about your programming language. That as least was some form of delight.

Watch the video, especially the second half. There's a lot about the 6502 that wasn't apparent from the data sheet.

There's a certain delight in getting the most out of such a limited set of instructions and registers, counting the clock-cycles, reducing the bytes used. It's much more fun than assembly on modern processors!

I found the z80 delightful to work with, especially in comparison with the 6502 because it had twice as many registers and you could switch banks of them on the z80.

you have to love programming to really appreciate assembly, the succinctness, the satisfaction of being so close to the metal, none of this high level peek and poke nonsense of high level languages :)

you don't write code using a hex dump???

You write assembly code using either hand assembly or more efficiently using a tool called an assembler which makes the tedious task of mapping instructions by name to their hex values easier. After a while you get to remember the common ones though, C9 for example.

And I haven't heard of your school buddy, sorry.

He wrote code with amazing speed using the machine language monitor on the PET -- without an assembler.

Yep, I can remember doing that on a CBM 3016 in secondary school - must have been about 1979. A little later this 'thing' arrived that comprised a keyboard in a large, plain grey case with a micro-cassette drive, permanently hooked up to a domestic TV by a large umbilical cord. A group of us were given some information booklets and told to 'see what we could do with it'. We later found out it was a prototype for the BBC micro and further code updates allowed us to select teletext pages on the TV and go to 'special' pages that downloaded code to the micro-cassette. We wrote a lot of simple games and apps for the beast.

I had a lot of fun with the 6502 and I really liked the 6809, so I guess they felt delightful to me. It is a different type of mindset and can really make you focus on the problem at hand. The IBM 370 was a might bit of a pain though.

One of the delightful things in programming a 6502-based computer is the relative importance of the OS. In those times, you had complete control over the machine and you called the OS (or the ROM routines) to do whatever you wanted it to.

I remember that when I had to do floating-point math or calculate a screen address (something convoluted on an Apple II) I would simply call a subroutine in ROM and pick up the results.

Perhaps your experience is limited.

The PDP 10 had a delightful instruction set. While I didn't use the 7094 instruction set, many seemed to feel that it was a good set, and felt let down by the 360 instruction set when it came out.

The motorolla 6809 was nice, and it seemed to have a flavor of the pdp-11 (which itself was a delightfully simple and elegant set).

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