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Comment by UK-AL | Hacker News Reader

Assembly, and Low Level Coding is the exact opposite of solving 'real' problems. Your going low level to create problems that didn't exist, as opposed to working on the core issue(often business related) your software is trying to solve.

Languages should allow you to focus on creating software that fixes a real world problem, as fast and cleanly as you can. That doesn't include bit flipping, or bit operators or anything like that unless required.

People should be working in super high-level languages like Haskell, OCaml, F#, Clojure, or languages that fit their domain perfectly. The goal is to fix problem the as concisely and quickly as possible.

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There are many goals and many problems. "People" should use the right tool for the job. I don't want to try to write performance critical code or low-level code (OS level, drivers, critical libraries) in a language that seems almost designed to resist my efforts. Similarly, most people don't want to write business critical processing in C.

Writing low-level code is important for writing the underlying libraries for those high-level languages, e.g. the run-time systems or the big integer routines.

It's also important due to it helping one understand everything that's going on under the hood in whatever high level language one's using

Who gives a shit? Computers are cheap, programmers are expensive. You're probably deploying onto Amazon anyways, so don't kid yourself.

In the vast majority of cases, it doesn't help your average coder one bit to know about whether or not a particular type of shift on their platform is arithmetic or logical, or how their cache is structured (again, running in a VM, lolzors).

There are cases where it matters--and surprise surprise, most of us don't work in those fields.

While it is important to know low level details if you are going to understand how the high level language is built, it is not necessarily important to know how the high level language works if such details don't readily aid you in your task.

It might be nice and it might be cool, but it doesn't matter so much. Or to put it another way, how many people learned how tracing JITs work to do JS form validation? Would it matter if I did/didn't know this? Would it make a better form validator? Eh.

There seems to be some limit to the benefit that knowing such LL details provides. It's icing, but it is most definitely not the cake, and when your time/budget/skills are limited, you want cake, not icing.

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