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Comment by hondadriver | Hacker News Reader

This applies to general public but someone with Freelance Web developer based in Amsterdam. Mostly Node and React. in their bio should probably know what Assembly is...

Why? Serious question. Nothing about that bio says “this person should know about the existence of assembly” to me.

And besides, with their question they’ve made an effort to learn about it so I don’t see any reason to criticize them for not knowing. It’s like the xkcd referenced says, every day there are a bunch of people hearing about something for the first time. We should be happy that they hear about it!

Really? A programmer of any stripe who doesn't recognize assembly just seems like a very wrong thing. One wonders what their mental model of the computer is like.

I imagine that most people abstract at the levels above and below assembly languages. E.g. they know about high level languages, and that a CPU cannot directly run that, but their view of the lower level probably does not include any human readable artifacts such as latin characters but rather binary and voltages.

We have web pages with multiple seconds of latency because devs don't have a deep understanding of the performance hits of composing programs. And for that you need to understand how the CPU works.

I do not believe that knowing ASM would even remotely translate into the ability to optimize web pages for latency: understanding high-level concepts like TLS, HTTP/HTTP2, and being to understand JS engines seems far more applicable.

You also seem to be making the assertion that you cannot understand how a CPU works without knowing ASM, which seems equally spurious.

ASM is fairly useless knowledge for that problem, unless you go in the deep weeds of internals of your JS interpreter.

Should they? Why?

Look, I wrote assembly when I was a teen, went to school for CS twice and can't do squat with it today. I know it is ASM but beyond that it's not that interesting or exciting to me.

This person's job is strictly to build frontend web apps. Knowledge of assembly is largely ornamental to that pursuit. I'm not even sure someone getting as BSCS and MSCS would spend enough time with it to care.

It's important, critically so for some people, but I wouldn't ding a job applicant for a node job for not recognizing it.

I don’t think everyone who writes code needs to know how to write assembly, but I think it’s important to know that it exists and possibly what it looks like. Maybe not while you’re still learning to code, but once you’ve actually started working in the industry it’s a good thing to know, if only because it gives you a bit of context of how computers actually work.

1) No, you only need to know about assembly language if you go for deep microoptimizations.

2) Assembly is vastly more high level than modern hardware, so much that most of those CISC instructors are broken into tens to thousands micro operations. It's not even close to any kind of machine architecture course. You will need that kind of deep knowledge to write optimal compilers which probably take (extended) C and not assembly language.

Assembly (well, machine code if you want to nitpick) is still the representation of a program right at the interface between software and hardware. It's the processor's native API, no matter how many layers of additional abstraction behind that API. So it's a pretty important level of abstraction if you want to have a reasonable high-level idea of how a computer works.

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