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Comment by beej71 | Hacker News Reader

Well, I'm only a few years from retirement, so maybe the demographics are different now, I grant. Used to be everyone learned assembly in college.

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I learned MIPS assembly and there were brief references to x86 assembly, and I know most of my friends would do fine with assembly, but, alas, most engineers I've known barely even know what memory management is, so being able to create proper abstractions with assembly would definitely be out of their league.

It's vaguely similar to how JS and Node enable so many people to flood the market without really knowing the underlying technology. Many of those would definitely not pick up assembly (which is the entire point I was trying to make)

Hell, I did a Physics degree, and I had to learn assembly (the NS 32k), which wasn't a huge issue alongside the 6502, Z80 and m68k that I already knew.

Now retired (come join the dark side, we have cookies) but still a few years away from what people would call "retirement age"

I need to retire so I can really tear into my massive project backlog. :) I'm really enjoying teaching, but it's unclear if this position will exist 3 years from now.

I think some still do. But writing a few lines of code in some computer architecture course isn't really enough. It's not just the language, it's the libraries and not understanding how things work under the hood.

I remember back in 2014 we had a class in assembly (we used x86 assembly running in DOSbox). One of the projects I most vividly remember was writing a simple paint program controlled using the arrow keys.

by the 90's more like struggle through a single, one-semester course that had a unit and some labs on assembly.

That was 40 years ago when we had 5.25" discs in school. In todays schools (up to 16-18), nobody knows what Assembly is, even the teachers.

Used to be everyone learned assembly in college.

I imagine that was x86, which was relatively easy but also horrible. Very few people are writing assembly today because you'd need to be able to do x86-64 SIMD, ARM64, and maybe RISC-V, which are all quite a bit more complicated.

MIPS, because of the books provided for computer architecture (Hennessy and Paterson) were written by the MIPs designers. No one I knew of learned X-86, the Dragon compiler book however had all its examples in VAX assembly.

Everyone else is saying MIPS, but we learned Motorola 68k Assembly. Which I suspect was mainly because we had a bunch of dev boards for it. It was fun starting off by toggling the lights, using the switches to make a primitive binary calculator, before leveling up to making programs than communicated over the serial port.

We learnt MIPS assembly as part of the processor design class, where we built a DLX processor & emulated it running our code, and then we learnt x86 assembly as part of a class on debugging & reverse engineering (which is also where you'd usually have the good old bomblab assignment). That was in 2014.

It was MIPS for me, which isn't widely used in industry, but it did the job.

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