Re:Optimizing a 6502 image decoder, from 70 minutes to 1 minute
by dylan604 on Monday September 29, 2025 @03:40PM
(#45417858)
Interesting. My CS course started right out of the gate with assembly. My fledgling computer course in high school started with Pascal instead of BASIC. Clearly, before "mid 2000s". Maybe I was taking classes out of order??? It was way to long ago for me to remember those details, but I was well underwater trying to jump right into the low level language. I remember struggling with pointers in Pascal until one day it finally clicked. Assembly came across to me as a weed out course right at the beginning.
In the mid 2000s, intro CS classes started focusing on Java. These days Python occupies a similar niche. It's not until they start to take an operating systems class, possibly by junior year, that a student might be confronted with manual memory management.