News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Paint16b: A 16 byte paint program written in 12 lines by AstralStorm on Monday November 19, 2018 @11:13AM (#18487397)
1) No, you only need to know about assembly language if you go for deep microoptimizations.

2) Assembly is vastly more high level than modern hardware, so much that most of those CISC instructors are broken into tens to thousands micro operations. It's not even close to any kind of machine architecture course. You will need that kind of deep knowledge to write optimal compilers which probably take (extended) C and not assembly language.

Re:Paint16b: A 16 byte paint program written in 12 lines by Sharlin on Monday November 19, 2018 @12:26PM (#18487965)
Assembly (well, machine code if you want to nitpick) is still the representation of a program right at the interface between software and hardware. It's the processor's native API, no matter how many layers of additional abstraction behind that API. So it's a pretty important level of abstraction if you want to have a reasonable high-level idea of how a computer works.