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by daishi55 34 days ago
How is this different from saying “if you can’t do the job without the compiler, you can’t do the job”?
3 comments

I'm fairly sure that if a compiler stops working or has a bug, the expectation is that an engineer is capable of handling it in some way. I don't think any stakeholder will have much sympathy for "compiler stopped working, we can't do our jobs now" argument.
Is that wrong? My assembly programming sucks, but I can do it (slowly) if I need to. I'd expect most serious developers to have that level of knowledge.
I would not. I know a handful of folks who can kinda sorta make their way through hello world in assembly with the docs open, and a handful more who could maybe implement some of the simplest coreutils like cat, maybe. But most devs I know have never seriously written a line of amd64 or aarch64 assembly. It’s just not commonly practical knowledge- even if it is very cool knowledge and helps one understand why things work (or don’t work) under the hood.

Even knowledge of how to drop to C is fairly rare in much of development, and you know what? That’s okay. We all specialize in our own areas of this beast of a field.

For one thing, compilers actually work and enable you to do useful things.
rolleyes