Hacker News Reader

Comment by bugsy | Hacker News Reader

I used to say absolutely yes too, but it's been a long time since I needed to mess with it. You no longer need to write in assembly to optimize speed, or even to write drivers for any but the rarest cases that hardly anyone will run into.

Does it help you understand how things really work? Yes, as does knowing things like CPU design down to the gate level. Most don't know that (I am one who does) and I never hear it advocated that they should.

I think it makes more sense to emphasize other difficult core skills that are far more useful like knowing how to build a compiler.

View on HN

> Most don't know that (I am one who does) and I never hear it advocated that they should.

You and me must not be hanging out in the same circles. I hear it advocated all the time. You can't claim to understand how CPUs work if you can't design a simple CPU. Just as you can't claim to understand how compilers work if you can't design a simple compiler. The inevitable objection to this line of thinking is, where does it end? Should you also have to study device and semiconductor physics to understand how computers work? Yes, you probably should, but you can terminate this recursion any time you feel you're not learning anything sufficiently enlightening or helpful compared to other things you could be learning.

Very few people have designed CPUs. A lot of people manage to write great software despite this. It seems to be irrelevant. Again, coming from someone who knows.

If someone is interested, yes, I absolutely encourage them to pursue that interest and yes it will deepen their understanding of how things work.

But necessary? It's self evident that it's not necessary because many don't know it and write great software despite this. And if deciding what sorts of optional things one should master, it's fairly low on the list.

I completely understand the advocacy. I used to tell people that without fluency in assembly they couldn't consider themselves competent. That might have been true when I said it. It's not true any more, it not a fundamental skill any more because it's not necessary except for certain tasks that all but a few won't encounter. We can't reasonably require that everything that is not necessary for all but a few should be required, there would be too many things. It's now an optional skill.

Very few things are truly necessary to know, so I was working from the premise that such studies would be undertaken as a way of rounding out someone's knowledge. The direct practical applications of that knowledge to programming are rare, I agree.

I have taught myself to never say that you need to know X to be a great programmer. You'll note that's not what I said with respect to designing CPUs. When I was a hot-shot kid who fancied himself something special, I used to think and say to people that great programmers needed to know X, Y and Z, which just so happened to be things I enjoyed and knew a lot about. After close to a decade of working with a lot of different programmers, many good and some very great, I've found that there's really no easy one-size-fits-all set of prerequisite knowledge once you get beyond the basics that everyone agrees are important to master. I pride myself on being well-rounded and having an equal mastery of high-level and low-level elements, but I can't honestly say that by itself makes me better than someone who is more exclusively focused on either of the two ends. It's mostly a matter of personal inclination.

Yeah, sounds like we are in complete agreement on this.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com