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Comment by vconnor | Hacker News Reader

Assembly is very useful to learn, but does not bring as strong a paradigm shift, as it is similar to most other imperative, procedural languages.

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Bootstrapping a Forth in assembly is probably a better option, two birds with one stone.

or, if you're a stoned bird, perhaps bootstrap your modern skillz by ...

a session prompting Claude to quickly write all of:

  a forth style assembler for wasm 
  targeting a forth written in 6502 machine code (not assembly) 
  targeting a 6502 emulator/debugger written in Rust
  that Rust being compiled into a wasm browser project with 
  a typescript ui for display api support for all the nested contexts

personally I've only ever done the forth-like in 6502 machine code task, but then I am old and useless (er, "retired") and wouldn't want to mislead youngsters onto my failed path

It does though. It teaches you that closed source is still open source in many many ways. Especially when you have something like Ghidra or IDA Pro. Nowadays this is even more true because LLMs can speed up retrieval of missing knowledge way more quickly. Back in the day I had to search for stuff but I bet now that LLMs give a decent guess at decompilation of something. Also it's the systems programming language and requires you to dive into the computer architecture of things. Try that with Python or JavaScript.

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