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Comment by tedd4u | Hacker News Reader

I think you'd have to start with 55+ years old and go upward to find an age range where more than 10% of programmers routinely wrote assembler code in their careers.

To find the same for machine code you'd need to start at 65 or older.

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Really not the same. Assembly / machine code is entirely deterministic - they are a notation for your thoughts. LLM produced content is more a smorgasbord of other people's thoughts, and cannot help you with clarity, conviction, etc etc.

Yes Assembly is deterministic (barring severe hardware bugs). But that's the point. People are no longer writing Assembly.

They meant to say that swithing from assembly to high-level programming is not the same as switching from high-level programming to LLMs, because the latter loses you the guarantee that the computer will do what you told it to.

Sure, it's less common that people are writing full-fledged applications in nothing but assembly.

However, I would strongly disagree that people are no longer writing/using assembly. I was writing a bit of assembly the other day, for example.

Come on over to the game emulation, reverse engineering, exploitation writing, CTF, malware analysis, etc. hobby spaces. Knowledge of assembly is absolutely mandatory to do essentially anything useful.

Great examples, those.

Here's another:

https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp/blob/main/sectorlisp.S

Given this, you might write less asm.

My point is that the coding LLMs are another point on the reliability / ease of use spectrum. We already mostly moved to another point with HLL compilers from machine language. This is another leap where the transform is unreliable but it's very easy to use (and it could preserve output edits, to some indeterminate extent).

change that 10% to 0.5% and I would agree. i am 62, worked in low level coding and hw interfacing. 'routinely' not even; i would say on occasion, needed to look at a bit, or even more rare, had to write a bit (like a small module)

Curious, what do you normally use? I had to write a few timing sensitive MC drivers and the only way I knew how onto do that reliably was using assembly. But granted, it wasn't _often_, just more than I expected (especially for someone who doesn't normally do that low level stuff, this was for an art project)

sure. timing sensitive stuff. < 50 lines. jump back to C as soon as the critical stuff is over.

'performance stuff'. i try to solve it in C for a bunch of reasons; others readability is one. almost never need to do more than a short macro of assembly embedded in C.

the actual most use of have for assembly is "what is happening here.." and need to ask the debugger for the assembly for some deeper understanding.

Some years, did these things 5 times, so maybe 20 hours. Other years, never.

As far as "sit down and write some assembly to solve problem X", the answer is never. (except when X is right in the middle of the above items)

Yeah, my father is now 70, I do remember he wrote assembly language in the late 80s but not since.

39 and have over 10 years writing assembly. huh?

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