Is Assembly Programming Still Relevant, Today?

intelinsight asks: "Consider the following question given the current software development needs, and also the claims of the Assembly lovers for it being a language that gives one insights of the internal working of a computer. How relevant or useful is it to learn Assembly programming language in the current era? "

easy as 1 2 3

[zeromusmog]

Nobody has to learn assembly language anymore to create piddly things like compilers or program ultra-small devices or anything like that. You can do all of those things with Ruby on Rails now.

Why bother? Just ...

[Bin_jammin]

Hire someone else to code in assembly.

Re:All's quiet

[Tackhead]

> ....... (sounds of crickets) ........

Give me a moment. I've still gotta figure out the six nested timing loops I need to toggle the speaker cone in and out in such a way that it sounds like a cricket instead of a bird.

Re:Yes.

[hazem]

If they knew about big-O, they would have girlfriends, and by definition, could not be programmers.

The long way

[quantaman]

I realize that assembly is very useful to know and can be useful in certain instances.

But writing in assembly has always given me the same feeling as eating rice with a single chopstick.

Re:All's quiet

[mrbluze]

Nothing to CX here, MOV along.

Re:All's quiet

[brunascle]

you missed one:

• You're writing malware to exploit a buffer overflow vulnerability

Re:All's quiet

[Anonymous Coward]

I saw that Francisco - You're getting a special
version of the Computer Org test tomorrow.
One just for you.

Your computer org professor.

Re:All's quiet

[FMota91]

You are too thoughtful sir. Thank you! Did I ever tell you how fabulous I think IBM assembly language is? You know, it has all those wonderful registers (yes, all 16 of them, if you count those 4 or 5 registers that you can't use). Ah well, I should know better than to post on Slashdot with my name about a subject on the eve of that test. If you answer this, don't just answer "Indeed". :) Oh, and I know you're going to show this to class tomorrow. Hi his class. :) Anyway, enough that's enough of me mongering around on /. for today. Time to work on Calculus. See you tomorrow. :)

Re:All's quiet

[Anonymous Coward]

JMP GOAT_CX

Re:All's quiet

[UnknownSoldier]

> Real-time Raytracing (a myth, yes, but a good one nonetheless)

2005 [slashdot.org] called, they want their hardware [google.com] back.

--
How can you understand Life if you don't even understand what happens after Death??

Re:The long way

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, no deadlock.

Re:Yes.

[shadanan]

And if you're in physics, you should know math, and if you're in math, you should know Greek. :-)

Erk

[Fross]

One day won't there be little nanobots floating around with 512 bytes of memory and a 1 mhz processor that need to buzz around your body and eat up your precancerous cells?

Now I'm picturing something like Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds, only with ZX81s.

In any case

[BrokenHalo]

One of the best reasons to learn to do assembly programming is because it's fun.

Though I can't say that's why I did it. In my case (back in the early fourteenth century), we all wrote assembly code because that's how serious programming was done. Sure, we had COBOL to update ledgers and write reports, and FORTRAN to take the hard work out of maths computation, but for anything that really needed any kind of optimisation on those old core-memory machines, assembly was the only way to go.

There were other reasons too; I worked in a computer bureau with several Burroughs B3700 machines, and we had one or two clients for whose packages the source code had been long since mislaid.

So rather than re-writing the thing from scratch whenever mods needed to be made, a couple of us used to hack directly on the binary. It's not all that easy, but it's job security. ;-)

Re:debugging

[BrokenHalo]

They stare at the code for a while, make wild guesses...

Sure. But that's only because "The C Programming Language [is] A language which combines the flexibility and power of assembly language with the readability of assembly language". ;-P

Re:All's quiet

[bckrispi]

... haven't tried to do much with the latest version of Eclipse, have you? s.l..o...w... to the point of unusability.

I use Eclipse 3.2 on an Intel dual T2400(1.8gHz), 2gb ram. It runs fine. Maybe it's just you? :P

Re:Very relavent

[Xner]

Even the page you link to acknowledges the terms have been used interchangeably.