Pascal not considered harmful - was Re: Rich kids are into COBOL

[Mouse]

>>>> Folks in the lab would stop looking up the instruction encodings
>>>> and would just ask me...I could do the assembly in my head...
>>> I'm not at all certain that such a skill is even marginally
>>> valuable today.
>> Knowing instruction encoding is important to anyone who is writing
>> or maintaining an assembler or disassembler.  [...and others...]
> Uh, huh--and probably someone writing a good optimizing compiler.
> But that's how many people outside the vast sea of script kiddies?

Not a lot, but, I would say, enough that "not...even marginally
valuable" is not applicable.

> To put it another way, how many advertisements for job openings
> include "must recognize and interpret Super Wazoo 800 machine codes"?

How many ads for jobs include anything like "must be capable of writing
a compiler"?  Yet compilers get written, and writing them is a
valuable, if niche, skill.

Lots of niche jobs aren't advertised widely, sometimes not at all, but
that doesn't make them unimportant.

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