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by jkubicek 38 days ago
OK sure, but back when old heads were complaining about the kids not knowing assembly, those same kids knew C or Fortran or something.

In 2026, if you call yourself a developer and can't solve FizzBuzz without help, it's hard to argue that you know anything useful at all.
1 comments
brookst 38 days ago
Do modern languages and compilers count as “help”? Because I could probably do fizzbuzz in x86 assembly, but it would take a while to page that back in, and I suspect most people who call themselves developers today simply could not do it without help.
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thaumasiotes 38 days ago
> I could probably do fizzbuzz in x86 assembly

How? Fizzbuzz requires you to produce output; that's not functionality that CPU instructions provide.

You can call into existing functionality that handles it for you, but at that point what are you objecting to about the 'modern language'?

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rightbyte 38 days ago
You'd just call printf from assembly by knowing the ABI by heart.
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brookst 38 days ago
Well I could certainly assemble the string buffer. And if I can run dosbox, I can output to the screen buffer at 0xB800.

I’m not objecting to modern languages, I’m just saying that using them fails the “can write fizzbuzz with no help” test to only a slightly lesser degree than using AI tools. They’re a complex compile- and runtime environment that most developers don’t truly understand.

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