It was thus said that the Great Fred Cisin once stated: I would expect that an expert driver would need to have an understanding of how the engine relates to the rest of the car, in addition to understanding how the transmission and breaks relate. Yes, understanding how the car works overall helps, but the ability to rebuild an engine? I have to be sold on that one ... In 1992 when Doom came out, it only had two (2) routines hand coded in assembler---the rest was in C. Algorithmic optimizations, which is where you now get the most benefit. An extreme example would be replacing a bubble sort with quick sort (for a sufficient amount of items to be sorted). I remember several years ago working on a project (in C) that wasn't as fast as the previous implementation (also in C). Instead of reaching for assembly (which I could have done) I instead profiled the program---finding out which parts of the program where the actual hot spots instead of my guessing where the hot spots were. I basically converted seven small routines into macros (inline the code, instead of having a function call overhead) and easily doubled the speed, bringing it into line with the previous implementation (which had fewer features by the way). Was I helped with my knowledge of assembly? Possibly in writing the intial code. With the optimization (for speed)? I don't think so. Do I regret learning assembly? Not at all, I think it made me a better programmer, but that's me. I think the reason assembly isn't taught anymore is that industry (or academia) don't see it worth the time and effort to. Right now, the most expensive component in programming is the programmer, and anything to make the programmer more productive is seen as a good thing, and the one thing that makes a programmer productive is working with higher and higher level languages. Another example. A project (play project really) I worked on I started with Perl (one to learn the language). Text munging language and it took perhaps eight hours total to get it to the point I like it. But its sluggish on my development system (166MHz AMD 486). I then spent perhaps twice the time (16 hours, maybe 20) rewriting it in C (because I can). Vast improvement in speed---two, three orders of magnitude but part of that comes in Unix systems programming, and using a trick or two (like mapping a file directly into memory instead of reading each line, for one thing). But ... my programming expertise isn't exactly cheap and in a company setting, unless there were extenuating circumstances, the Perl version would be fast enough on modern hardware (where on modern hardware, it's the hardware itself that gives the two, three orders of magnitude). And the money paid me to write it in C can instead be put towards faster hardware. I would contend that it's cheaper to buy the faster hardware than to keep me on staff (or rather, it's more cost effective to have me doing other things than translating Perl into C). And now a days, who can afford to have a C programmer on staff? A friend of mine works at Sportsline (2nd only to ESPN for sports related news on the web). They have a Perl program to generate stats from the web server logs and to process a single day it takes nearly 22 hours. Sure, they could hire a programmer to rewrite their log processor in C and (depending upon the programmer and the complexity of the processing) reduce the runtime of the program. But then they have to keep someone around that knows C (or C++ or ... ) and that's an expense they probably don't want to incure. Perl programmers are cheaper, as is hardware. Trade-offs. Right now, the optimization being done is developer time and expertise. Faster with less skilled programmers. Or in other words: Good. Fast. Cheap. Pick two. -spc ("Premature optimzation is the root of all evil." ---Donald Knuth)

Actually, IMHO the fact that it's often not a good idea to code in assembly language has _nothing_ to do with whether it should be taught (I think it should). Think of the other things that are taught in schools. How many people actually _need_ to learn calculus? Or even algebra for that matter. Why bother reading the classics of litterature? In fact what do you think should be taught in schools. I will agree that most programs (although not all) are better written in high level languages. Even so, I think every competant programmer and hardware deisgner should have learnt at least one machine code, and should have written at least one machine code program. It is important to understand that a program can be coded as a sequence of bytes/words, what operations are commonly available in machine code, and so on. It _will_, IMHO, make you a better programmer. Actually, I think everyone should have a go at writing microcode too. And should understnad at least one processor (however simple) to gate/ff level. I don;t claim to be a programmer, BTW, but I have written machine code and assembly language. -tony

Lisp 1965 Fortran 1958 both were hot in 1966, but FTN was ahead then too. John A. real quick, 35 minutes

It was thus said that the Great Teo Zenios once stated: A friend of mine just finished up his doctorate in Physics, and his dissertation required extensive programming in Fortran. So it's still in use. -spc (Remembers taking Fortan in college ... )

On Wed, 23 Jun 2004, Tony Duell wrote: There needs to be a balance. The students want "practical" training. They want stuff that they can apply immediately, and they want employability. Meanwhile, we want to teach them "fundamentals". Therefore, the best way to walk that narrow line, is to teach theory, principles, and fundamentals USING real world practical tools. For example, We DO NOT "teach Visual C++". We DO NOT have a "Visual C++ course". We teach C++; we do it using Visual C++. I'm sure glad that I teach C, not C++! I make them do at least one program using a command line compiler (DeSmet "Personal C"), one program using a simple integrated development environment (Turbo C), and then I let them use ANY compiler or platform that they want to use, even Visual C++. I intend to try to teach the fundamentals, principles, and theory of assembly language. But I am going to do it using 80x86, as a concession to what the students want. Yes, it would be "better", but not what the students want, to teach it with a better processor, whether real or imaginary, but I am there to help the students learn what they want to learn. (and try to sneak in a bit of more general knowledge) That's right. We have a periodic advisory committee, that is made up mostly of community employers. We had one guy who wanted us to drop all of our programming classes, and replace them with four semesters of "Power-Builder". My response to him was "inappropriate". FORTRAN. Q: Current C compilers are written in C. What was the FIRST C compiler written in? -- Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin(a)xenosoft.com

Mostly in PDP11 assembler. It's online somewhere... (the old Bell Labs unices are around, going back to fragments of V3.) paul

It was thus said that the Great Ethan Dicks once stated: There's an advantage? 8-) -spc (One of the wierder things about AmigaDOS ... )

This sort of comment worries me. If everyone just accepts what we have now, and nobody bothers to try anything different, then there will never be real progress. -tony