25 Mar
2005
25 Mar
'05
10:52 p.m.
Eric Smith wrote:
I'm not sure I buy that either. Hundreds of years
from now (or after
the singularity), when most machines are designed by other machines with
no human intervention other than stating the requirements, will there be
anyone who understands the lowest level of how they work? Will they even
be simple enough that it's possible to understand them the way we can
understand a microprocessor today?
Hundreds of years from now, there will be a new definition of "low level", and
people will still understand and work with it. ("High level" in that time
period is probably Star Trek-ian talking directly to the computer.)
But I agree with your point that assembly language is
not dead, or
even "nearly dead". Though it certainly seems to be much less used
relative to other languages than it was even just ten years ago.
*Much* is opinion, and gives away your viewpoint as outside professional
programming industries. Is it used less? Depends on what you're trying to
build. I find myself using assembly *more* than I did 20 years ago simply
because I understand it better (and understand what my compiler doesn't). Is
it used 100% to build applications? No; free C compilers and free OSes means
that you never need to construct an application completely from scratch ever
again. But I think you're omitting the use of in-line assembly for critical
loops -- while in-line assembly may be less than 1% of a program, it can
provide 50% of the optimization (above the algorithm itself, obviously) and is
very much in use.
There is an eleven-billion-dollar industry that uses assembly in every single
one of its products, but mentioning it on this list is most likely a cardinal
sin so I won't mention it (no, it's not porn).
--
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org) http://www.oldskool.org/
Want to help an ambitious games project? http://www.mobygames.com/
Or check out some trippy MindCandy at http://www.mindcandydvd.com/