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by benterix 293 days ago
> The vast majority of programmers don't know assembly, so can in fact not work without all the abstractions they rely on.

The problem with this analogy is obvious when you imagine an assembler generating machine code that doesn't work half of the time and a human trying to correct that.
2 comments
vidarh 293 days ago
An abstraction doesn't cease to be one because it's imperfect, or even wrong.
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nerdsniper 293 days ago
I mean, it’s more like 0.1% of the time but I’ve definitely had to do this in embedded programming on ARM Cortex M0-M3. Sometimes things just didn't compile the way I expected. My favorite was when I smashed the stack and I overflowed ADC readings into the PC and SP, leading to the MCU jumping completely randomly all over the codebase. Other times it was more subtle things, like optimizing away some operation that I needed to not be optimized away.
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