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Comment by flutas | Hacker News Reader

> Kids these days don’t know basic assembly

I have to disagree on that one.

Most CS programs will have an assembly class as a mandatory one.

Is it used daily? No. Would they be incredibly rusty and probably require a refresher? Probably, but so would most people on something not used daily.

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Interesting, the college I went to (2009) didn’t teach it at all. C++ was the lowest level they taught and they switched to Python after I left (as in they use it instead of c++ last I heard).

If I ever needed to write assembly (which probably means something has gone horribly wrong in my life) then I’m sure I could learn it on the fly, just like I’ve learned other things never taught in college on an as-needed basis.

Very interesting.

Yeah my husbands college (I'm a SW eng, he wants to be one) teaches C++ as the base...and this is a "just" a state school in a Arkansas.

Also gotta correct myself, after asking him it looks like I was wrong. Assembly isn't a direct requirement but it's one of three electives you have to chose from.

You have to choose between either assembly, cybersecurity or data science and assembly is considered the easiest apparently.

(2006) - we had a class/labs on logic gates as well as 2 separate classes that taught asm. I'd say 80% of the labs were C at the time.

It's kind of crazy to think the closest thing to a systems programming language a graduated software engineer knows is freaking python.

Imagine never having used a compiler. Don't get me wrong, people get stuff done with Python and JavaScript, but it's a crazy time we live in.

This argument falls apart for me personally. I'm sure we could go back a decade or two and find someone saying something like:

It’s quite alarming to think that the most advanced language many new software engineers are familiar with is merely C or C++.

Imagine graduating without ever having programmed in assembly. It’s not that C or C++ aren’t capable languages, but we’re definitely in a strange era when the deeper understanding of machine interaction through lower-level programming is becoming a rarity.

I don't think that's quite the same, but in general I agree with that sentiment, even though you weren't serious about it.

Folks should know their basic C/C++ just like they should know enough x86 to make sense of what godbolt.org tells them. But oh, well, that's probably a lonely hill to die on. Having a rough idea of all these levels of abstraction work and interact is something I profit a lot in my line of work, but that's just a small niche and I get that (profiling and optimizing scientific, signal processing routines).

I consider assembly to be a basic skill like arithmetic. Most of us have a calculator on hand 24/7, but being able to look at a clock and say 'I've got 12 minutes' is useful.

I had to take an "operating systems" class in Java 15 years ago, luckily i already knew enough about C and assembly to know it's a waste of time. the professor thought it was more important to teach "fundamentals" than low-level programming.

i got a c in that class (the grade not the language) because i didn't know java and kept having difficulties with the way it forces you to shoehorn OOP into everything.

They didn't teach it at all or you attained a degree without taking it?

I don't remember seeing a class on it but it was a long time ago. I also don't remember it being required to get a degree. I just looked on my college's website and they offer 2 assembly classes it looks like, I'm not sure if they existed when I went there (I assume they did) and neither looks like it's required but I don't have the time or energy to dive back into that kafkaesque hellscape of figuring out what's required to graduate.

However, I didn't get a degree so maybe it was shoehorned into some high level course. I had a job writing software while I was in college and dropped out to do that full time once I felt I wasn't getting any value from continuing my "education". It's never been an issue in my career and I've done well by my own metrics at least.

My kid built an 8 bit cpu based on some YouTube videos he found when he was in high school and some cheap circuits he bought on Amazon.

I’d argue that there are more self-taught kids who know low level programming than 20 years ago.

The information to do this is so much more accessible now and LLMs are a very powerful tool in the hands of someone who is curious and motivated.

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