Totally OT, but frustrated.....

[Jim Leonard]

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/
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