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Comment by tinco | Hacker News Reader

Kind of ironic that nowadays many people in our generation consider the newer generations to be lacking fundamental education because they never used GOTO based programming languages. I've talked to multiple people who lamented that young programmers have never done assembly or BASIC.

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It’s helpful to have a mental model of how the computer works. I don’t know if it’s necessary that one have spent mountains of time building real software using a GOTO/jmp style, but having exposure to it would be nice, rather than hiding it away.

Jeff Dunteman’s assembly programming books included a “chapter 0” that I always loved, and which really stuck with me for how creatively they taught those topics.

I mean, CPUs do a bunch of work to make us believe they still operate just as a fast PDP-11, and I would wager that besides compiler experts that work on the backend parts of compilers, not many people have a real feel for modern hardware (obviously besides those that actually work on that given hardware).

So I'm not convinced that even those who think they know how it works know it actually.

We need updated board games that replicate the function of a CPU.

Assembly? Sure, that has some educational value.

BASIC? That’s just nostalgia for poverty.

Not entirely. GOTO can be pretty nice! And even the lack of structs probably has the advantage of helping to prepare you for today's world where column-major is back in style, for performance reasons.

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