On Fri, 22 May 2020, Nigel Johnson via cctalk wrote:
Now even embedded systems are running with gigahertz clock speeds! Over my
career I have seen the change from three assembler courses in a six-semester
program to just one 'so they can get their hands wet'!
In the end, when asked 'why do we have to learn this?' I ended up just saying
"When embedded systems start displaying really weird problems in a worldwide
installed base, some knowledge of assembler may be the only way to fix it.
People who can will be the first to be hired and the last to go if a company
down-sizes! Even when teaching C I showed them how to get down and understand
the assembler in the debugger.
I am retired from teaching now now and write in C and SQL :-) One day I will
do some PDP-11 assembler just for old time's sake on my PiDP-11!
Phillipe Kahn (Borland) included assembler in "Turbo Debugger And Tools",
but said that assembler was only for debugging.
Clancy and Harvey (UC Berkeley undergad CS) said, "Nobody uses assembler
any more, nor ever will again." They taught programming with SCHEME (a
LISP variant)
They gave a demo of how wonderful their mindset and recursion are. They
gave an example of a problem "that can not be done without recursion"!
While they were balancing their parentheses, I doodled a solution in C,
BASIC, and was partway through COBOL. Recursion is wonderful for some
things; thinking that it is the only solution is demented.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred ci...@xenosoft.com
