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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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But chess is approachable because you can learn how the pieces move in five minutes. Contrast that with some German board games where going over the instructions is the first hour and even then you aren't sure if you understand.

Why learn assembly?, well for one, the non-abstract aspect of assembly is less abstract, and arguably easier to understand than even the simplest high level languages. Secondly, learning assembly is also learning how computers work and that paradigm will help you even as you largely work in a high level language.

And beating the compiler isn't as hard as you might think if that becomes necessary some day.

I only read assembly these days, not write it. Usually when looking at profiling outputs for my hot path. So knowing assembly is still very valuable when you routinely find your code isn't keeping up with your data, and scaling isn't an option.

Another use case for assembly is reverse engineering, even if you aren't better than the compiler, being able to understand what the compiler spit out is really handy.

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.

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