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by ggerules 60 days ago
Upvotes for apricot and zrobotics for thoughtful shared experiences.

One of the continuous battles I kept loosing when introducing an assembly language undergraduate course. Other higher up colleages and deans would say... too hard... nobody uses that anymore... and shut the course down. But I would always sneak it into other courses I taught, systems programming, computer languages, computer architecture. But I've always felt there was a hole in my student's understanding of computers.

I grew up in a time when assembly language was a part of the cariculum. It helped bridge the gap between higher level languages like C/C++ ...etc. Also why certain language features exist. Also how many language constructs work. Also more importantly, as pointed out by the two posters above, it gives you a way to think about the CPU one asm line at a time what is going on the CPU ecosystem. That is fantastic training!

Even though I kept loosing the assembly language course battles, I hope I planted enough seeds in students that they will take it up on their own at some point. Everyone should at least learn to program in one assembly language.