Welcome to Orcmid's Lair, the playground for family connections, pastimes, and scholarly vocation -- the collected professional and recreational work of Dennis E. Hamilton

 
ONLamp.com: Why Learning Assembly Language is Still a Good Idea [May. 06, 2004].  Someplace, somewhere, there is a need to understand the processing of computer code at the computer level, usually expressed in assembly language as a way to make the code more-easily comprehensible.  This is an important area of specialty.  It also provides another way to develop a conceptual model in operating at different levels, since one can appreciate expressions in higher-level language and models of program operation based on a grounding in the machine-language level.  This is not a perfect fit.  It is still a good idea.  There are some sensibilities that scale from experience at the assembly language level, and this article is a review of assembly language as a source of understanding about what makes great code.  As I said, the relationship is indirect, so one must not take this too literally.

I wonder if Donald Knuth will have us learn about MMIX in the early volumes of The Art of Computer Programming or will assembly language disappear completely until there is treatment of compiling and operating-system construction (to whatever extent that is addressed) in later volumes.  I would prefer that the use of computer storage structures, register sets, and machine language be preserved so there is some kindly treatment that remains available and also aids in seeing how abstractions are built atop abstractions, with bigger abstractions to devour them.
posted by Dennis at 5/10/2004 12:22:17 PM