20 Feb
2015
20 Feb
'15
12:02 p.m.
On 02/20/2015 07:22 AM, Shiresoft wrote:
When I first started at IBM because build time for our
software was
about a week, we'd fix bugs and such with patches. 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 sorely out of practice
now. :-/
That's not an unusual skill if you spent hours day after day, poring
over OS core dumps trying to figure out what went wrong. I can--and
suppose many other OS developers also--remember instruction codings for
machines not seen in decades.
It used to be the custom that one learned to program a computer by first
learning the instruction opcodes and format. I recall coding forms
labeled "IBM 1620 Absolute Programming System". IIRC (and I'm not sure
that I do) the flipside was an SPS coding form.
I'm not at all certain that such a skill is even marginally valuable
today. Who codes much in assembly, much less machine code? C has
firmly established itself in the once memory-constrained MCU world, so
not even there.
It's a skill of fossils, like being able to recite great chunks of
Caesar's commentaries on the Gallic War. At best, most can vaguely
misquote "Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres"--at worst, many don't
even know who Caesar was, outside of the name for a salad made with eggs
and anchovies.
--Chuck