Sun, 13 Jun 2004

Why Learning Assembly Language Is Still Good

My first programming language was 65xx assembler - back in the days of 8-bit processors and small memory footprints, assembler was de rigueur for competent coders.

Today, well, the software world seems to have taken up what we jokingly referred to as the "Bill Gates Approach to Software Engineering": throw hardware at it! If you code is too slow, just get a faster processor. I must admit that there's some good that's come from this: code nowadays is much easier to read (and consequently to follow and debug) than it was in the bad old days of inline assembler and single character function names. And compilers have gotten better able to cope with and optimize even the most hideous constructs of newbies in a language like C++. Still ...

There's a different sense of accomplishment in a program that's small and fast - tight - as opposed to one that merely runs as it should, despite it's 5 MB executable file, gaggles of useless linked libraries and scads of OOPiness that needn't be there at all, except for the fact that some framework took them along for the ride.

Why Learning Assembly Language Is Still a Good Idea by Randall Hyde -- Randall Hyde makes his case for why learning assembly language is still relevant today. The key, says Randall, is to learn how to efficiently implement an application, and the best implementations are written by those who've mastered assembly language. Randall is the author of Write Great Code (from No Starch Press).

(link) [Slashdot]

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