I never did any meaningful amount of assembler programming

I only learn when I do things, not when I hear how they work. I think the teacher has the right idea.

> The point of this analogy: compilers are important tools. It's more important to understand how they work than it is to be able to build one in assembler. You'll probably never do that. Most people never work on compilers. Nor do they build their own operating systems, databases, etc. But it helps to understand how they work. The point of teaching how compilers work is understanding how programming languages are created and what their limitations are. I don't know that it's all these things at once, but most people I know that are good have done a bunch of spikes / side projects that go a level lower than they have to. Intense curiosity is good, and to the point your making, most people don't really learn this stuff just by reading or doing flash cards. If you want to really learn how a compiler works, you probably do have to write a compiler. Not a full-on production ready compiler, b…

When I did a CS major, there was a semester of C, a semester of assembly, a semester of building a verilog CPU, etc. I’d be shocked if an optimal CS education involved vibecoding these courses to any significant

> A good analogy here is programming in assembler. Manually crafting programs at the machine code level was very common when I got my first computer in the 1980s. Especially for games. By the late 90s that had mostly disappeared. Indeed, a lot of us looked with suspicion and disdain at people that used those primitive compilers that generated awful, slow code. I once spent ages hand-optimizing a component that had been written in C, and took great pleasure in the fact I could delete about every other line of disassembly... When I wrote my first compiler a couple of years later, it was in assembler at first, and supported inline assembler so I could gradually convert to bootstrap it that way. Because I couldn't imagine writing it in C, given the awful code the C compilers I had available generated (and how slow they were)... These days most programmers don't know assembler, and increasing…

> Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code. People learn by doing. There's a reason that "do the textbook problems" is somewhat of a meme in the math and science fields - because that's the way that you learn those things . I've met someone who said that when he get a textbook, he starts by only doing the problems, and skipping the chapter content entirely. Only when he has significant trouble with the problems (i.e. he's stuck on a single one for several hours) does he read the chapter text. He's one of the smartest people I know. This is because you learn by doing the problems. In the software field, that means coding. Telling yourself that you could code up a solution is very different than actually being able to write the code. And writing the code is how you build fluency and understanding as to how computers actually work. > I never did any meaningful amo…

While I may not write assembler, there is still significant value in being able to read assembler e.g. godbolt.