Live data from Hacker News

Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

github.com

21–30 of 131 posts

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#21
post #17
post #11

I basically learned C++ and assembly programmer at the same time when I was 16 by just watching the output of gcc.godbolt.org (yes ok zoomer)

That's clever! I'll recommend that to my niece and daughters.

They might end up as compiler devs. Be careful...

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#22
post #14

Assembly language is actually simple stuff. You just need to read the datasheet. No difficult type systems to deal with. In the old days programming assembly language was nasty because one mistake could mean your computer had to be rebooted and you lost your work. Not anymore.

This is like saying chess is simple stuff because you can learn how the pieces move in five minutes.

If all you want is a basic understanding of how things work, that level is ok. If you want to play/program, it is a completely different story.

I'd even go so far to say: Why do assembly if your goal is not to be better than the compiler, at least in some respect? Beating the compiler, now tell me that it's simple stuff.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#24
post #14

Assembly language is actually simple stuff. You just need to read the datasheet. No difficult type systems to deal with. In the old days programming assembly language was nasty because one mistake could mean your computer had to be rebooted and you lost your work. Not anymore.

This is like saying chess is simple stuff because you can learn how the pieces move in five minutes. If all you want is a basic understanding of how things work, that level is ok. If you want to play/program, it is a completely different story. I'd even go so far to say: Why do assembly if your goal is not to be better than the compiler, at least in some respect? Beating the compiler, now tell me that it's simple stu…

A compiler’s main virtue is patience, not smarts. That’s because there’s no value in smarts; the systems like Itanium designed to need them turned out to be unusable.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#25

It was so fun working with Hack Clubbers on this project! Hack Club is a group of teenagers from all over the world, and we decided to learn assembly together from scratch and see what happened. We ended up making this guide as we learned, since a lot of the resources we were working with weren't the easiest to parse. Happy to answer any questions :)

I only skimmed but it's looking good so far! Would you like feedback or suggestions? And if so, using git issues or other? Thanks!

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#26
My favorite part is the heavily commented code examples. Those are much more useful for increasing my understanding than most other resources. To me, that level of information density just works better for my brain than articles or sites that try to explain things.

Something about being _in the code_ while stepping through lines one by one with explanations is just so much easier to follow. I wish more learning resources took this approach.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#28

It was so fun working with Hack Clubbers on this project! Hack Club is a group of teenagers from all over the world, and we decided to learn assembly together from scratch and see what happened. We ended up making this guide as we learned, since a lot of the resources we were working with weren't the easiest to parse. Happy to answer any questions :)

This is really wonderful. And I like how simple and clean the pages look, even through markdown+github. Cheers.

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#29
post #25

It was so fun working with Hack Clubbers on this project! Hack Club is a group of teenagers from all over the world, and we decided to learn assembly together from scratch and see what happened. We ended up making this guide as we learned, since a lot of the resources we were working with weren't the easiest to parse. Happy to answer any questions :)

I only skimmed but it's looking good so far! Would you like feedback or suggestions? And if so, using git issues or other? Thanks!

Issues and PRs are preferred - thank you so much for reading! :D

Re: Some Assembly Required: An approachable introduction to assembly

#30
post #14

Assembly language is actually simple stuff. You just need to read the datasheet. No difficult type systems to deal with. In the old days programming assembly language was nasty because one mistake could mean your computer had to be rebooted and you lost your work. Not anymore.

The big hurdle for me was always understanding where assembly language ends and the assembler directives begin. That and the “now what?”, not knowing how to make a program do something interesting - needing to learn about the ROMs, the OS, etc.
Post reply on HN