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Comment by codetrotter | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

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