Re:Should programmers learn machine code?
by petercooper on Saturday September 05, 2009 @08:32PM
(#807281)
I learned 6502 in the 80s and did a lot of x86 in the mid 90s and.. I'd say "not anymore." Sure, it's useful to get a feel for it and have some experience with it, but I'm assuming "learn" in this case means a higher level of competency than just a broad understanding of it.
C is about as low as you need to know nowadays. x86 was critical to know in the 90s due to performance issues, but since the majority of software nowadays is running on some sort of VM or pulling heavily on frameworks (CLR, JVM, OS X's frameworks), it's mostly pointless to use x86 in all but the most unusual of projects.
The only reason I'd still advise a basic familiarity with assembler is to rid the notion that C is as low as it gets - you can get totally different results from different C compilers (and even incompatible results in some nasty cases) and it's worth at least knowing there's something underneath there that you can take a basic look at.
C is about as low as you need to know nowadays. x86 was critical to know in the 90s due to performance issues, but since the majority of software nowadays is running on some sort of VM or pulling heavily on frameworks (CLR, JVM, OS X's frameworks), it's mostly pointless to use x86 in all but the most unusual of projects.
The only reason I'd still advise a basic familiarity with assembler is to rid the notion that C is as low as it gets - you can get totally different results from different C compilers (and even incompatible results in some nasty cases) and it's worth at least knowing there's something underneath there that you can take a basic look at.