OSDev.org

If you work in the embedded field, in general you can't go to an employer and say you don't know assembly and don't know what the CPU is doing.

For operating system development, drivers, embedded, bring ups, then knowing assembly language is mandatory. Just like a car mechanic who needs to understand how the engine works and not only knowing how to drive cars.

If you work and create applications on desktops or phones, then you probably don't need as much. However, I have several times developed applications and resorted to debug on assembly level in order to understand what was going on so knowing how the CPU works might be helpful in higher level SW development as well. Knowing stuff in general not a bad thing.

Schol-R-LEA: You tell 30 years experience. It is fake. Point. You notice your long posts are tell no information just long random words after each other. You must ask mental helping you probably has serious issues you are incapable of social life.

StudlyCaps: This person is 50 year age and had no any job in his life. I check his comments. In the past 20 year he do operating systems and compiler. But he no do anything. His project are few files with a few lines mostly comments or declares. Not even anything code. In 20 years, nothing. Nothing works.

I am not the one who saying this! He made comment about this previous time confessing this. If you want, i can link.
viewtopic.php?f=13&t=30354
See. (Social Network Disability)

He have 1000 of comments and no one ??? noticed? No one is hey, something going on with this person?

I may join yesterday but this person says no assembly jobs. And now you protecting his lies. Why? Obviously most microcontroller job is assembly. Why he lies tolerated? You say all my comments are flame. They are not. Exception probably this

I dont tolerate bullshit. Look all of his comments are originating against somebody. viewtopic.php?f=2&t=32600&start=15

Look his comment on the compiler developer: You don’t seem to know enough about even the basics. LOL 20 years an no even hello world! And he says this? Why this tolerated? He is a fairytale showman with giant ego and have nothing.

But okay i dont want to flame. I am new, i not continue this topic. This things are however raising questions.
(Also assembly alone will not give job anyone.)

OSwhatever wrote:If you work in the embedded field, in general you can't go to an employer and say you don't know assembly and don't know what the CPU is doing.

This is, in my experience, not entirely true. I've worked on two embedded projects, both using C exclusively. I've also worked on a project with two Windows driver developers, and though the lead knew assembly well enough to debug core dumps, the project was in C++ and he told me that he'd never actually written assembly.

I've also worked with Linux kernel developers, again, they could debug dumps, but none could program assembly at a professional level, they worked in C.

I think you make a good point though that it is important to know what the CPU is doing. Like I mentioned, the valuable thing for a systems developer to know is how the hardware works, but I would consider that a different skill than assembly programming. I would also say that someone who can read assembly can not necessarily write it.

igorov70 wrote:StudlyCaps: This person is 50 year age and had no any job in his life. I check his comments. In the past 20 year he do operating systems and compiler. But he no do anything. His project are few files with a few lines mostly comments or declares. Not even anything code. In 20 years, nothing. Nothing works.

1/ He says he has 30 years experience in software, not in assembly programming.
2/ He is mostly sharing well sourced and researched information, and he has made huge contributions to the OSdev wiki. I see nothing in your link that says he has never worked, but even if he hasn't that doesn't matter to me because I judge him on what I see in this community.
3/ Don't use the fact that someone has a disability to imply they lack capability of credibility. This is not just insulting to him, but to everyone who has ever suffered from a disability which affects their ability to pursue a career.
4/ I don't believe that most micro controller programming is in assembly. If you have evidence I would really like to see it. In my experience most micro controller programming is C.
5/ If you have so much work to show, let's see it, where are all your completed projects?
6/ ~ the "compiler developer" you link to is not a skilled engineer and all the criticism of him in that thread is justified.

StudlyCaps wrote: ......

He backing up oppinion with his 30 years not me i dont have 30 years and not me who must show thing. BUT: https://imgur.com/a/1edUT This i has made for a high scool for teach x86 assembly. See i have working thing. Not well eashtablished but EXISTS. Unlike his. I dont make what and who has to show up dont misunderstand me but then he stop lying. Also maybe i mistakenly understand some due to the english. But his mental things are written by he. His writing them, not me.

igorov70 wrote:

StudlyCaps wrote: ......

He backing up oppinion with his 30 years not me i dont have 30 years and not me who must show thing. BUT: https://imgur.com/a/1edUT This i has made for a high scool for teach x86 assembly. See i have working thing. Not well eashtablished but EXISTS. Unlike his. I dont make what and who has to show up dont misunderstand me but then he stop lying. Also maybe i mistakenly understand some due to the english. But his mental things are written by he. His writing them, not me.

So what is your point? He said he has 30 years of experience. He never said experience with assembly or micro controllers. You misinterpreted what he said.
I think we are all talking from our own experience, we share it because we think it might be valuable to someone with less experience. Nobody is trying to give bad information, and since none of us have objective proof, everyone's experience is equally important.

igorov70 wrote:(snip)

Away, troll. Hie thee back to your Moscovian comment farm wherein manipulation of foreign democracy is committed. Destabilize a sovereign nation, not our forum.

Kazinsal wrote:

igorov70 wrote:(snip)

Away, troll. Hie thee back to your Moscovian comment farm wherein manipulation of foreign democracy is committed. Destabilize a sovereign nation, not our forum.

I was going to bow out of this thread, to stop feeding the flames, but I do feel this comment - amusing as it is - deserves at least a raised eyebrow, because anyone who thinks that a bunch of hobbyists, students, and egotistical a-holes (and yes, that includes myself) would be worth targeting, well, that person would probably have been committed to an insane asylum by now.

Speaking of which, how are you doing these days, andrewthompson555? I didn't recognize you under the broken English and the fake Russian IP address (well, well, you have upped your game, haven't you?), but what Kanizsal said put the pieces together for me. I may be wrong, but I doubt it, because the logic is nigh-inescapable: you are the only one so obsessed about this group to bother.

No one, even on this group, takes this group that seriously, except andrewthompson555.

OK, I am being facetious about this person being AT555. About the wider significance of the group I have spent an unconscionable amount of time posting to with nothing in the way of working code to show for it? Not so much.

He is right about me, in regards to actually getting anywhere in my projects, but I never claimed otherwise; I am the sort of nervous person who spends a lot of time building up to something and then backs off at the first snag. I have said so many times.

I have also mentioned that my professional career has been a disaster, and that I have never felt anything I have done as a paid programmer has been anything other than another harsh lesson learned, often one about the absurdity of society or the weaknesses of my own personality rather than about how to write code.

I am at a loss as to why this person thinks I will somehow be shamed for that. I have said those things more often than anyone. I at least am willing to admit to being useless, but as the Taoist master Chuang Tzu said, what is wrong with being useless?

igorov70 wrote:He backing up oppinion with his 30 years not me i dont have 30 years and not me who must show thing. BUT: https://imgur.com/a/1edUT This i has made for a high scool for teach x86 assembly. See i have working thing. Not well eashtablished but EXISTS.

Things that exist? Those I have; you can find code I have written all around this forum, and on the wiki, though I will admit that most of it is in the form of small snippets given as examples. Things that run (for certain values of 'runs')? Those, too, though I would not be so foolish as to think a "Hello, world!" boot loader I wrote fourteen years ago would be worth remarking on, given how little progress I've made on my larger projects since. Things I consider sufficient, or completed? No, I have none of those regarding OS dev, or most other things, really, but then, I doubt that anyone here has any of those, at least not anyone who is aiming for more than bragging rights.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:

Kazinsal wrote:

igorov70 wrote:(snip)

Away, troll. Hie thee back to your Moscovian comment farm wherein manipulation of foreign democracy is committed. Destabilize a sovereign nation, not our forum.

I was going to bow out of this thread, to stop feeding the flames, but I do feel this comment - amusing as it is - deserves at least a raised eyebrow, because anyone who thinks that a bunch of hobbyists, students, and egotistical a-holes (and yes, that includes myself) would be worth targeting, well, that person would probably have been committed to an insane asylum by now.

Honestly, I just thought it was a more entertaining line than just going with "christ, what an asshole".

Fair enough.

Anyway, the whole matter seems to hinge on @igorov70 misreading what I said: I said that paid assembly programming was uncommon. I never claimed such jobs didn't exist, just that the majority of programmers I have known have never needed it, and didn't know it.

If the problem is that @igorov70 doesn't believe me on this, well, (semi-)objective evidence isn't hard to find. If we look at the TIOBE Index, we find that assembly language in general - not any specific assembly language, but as a category - ranks 16th in 'popularity', at 1.7% of distribution based on the number of programmers experienced in it and the number of positions listed for it.

While this ranking isn't entirely objective, and does call for some interpretation, it does indicate that assembly language is not a necessary skill for programmers in general, which is what the OP, @ManHobby, asked about.

(I would argue that even web programmers would benefit from knowing something of assembly programming, as it would give them a better idea of what their code is actually doing, but that doesn't mean it is necessary.)

Why @igorov70 felt the need to contest my admittedly anecdotal statements, based on the lack of output in a hobby group, while claiming that this 'proved' I didn't have real-world experience (where the basis of my statements lay in experience during professional work, most of which was on proprietary code, which by definition would not be reflected here) isn't clear.

So I repeat my claims: I haven't seen many companies hiring for assembly programming jobs (which is to say, jobs in which any assembly programming is required). I have seen some, but only a very few, and the ones I have personally seen were all expert-level positions calling for programmers with extensive experience, not novices.

I said that I have personally only known a handful of programmers who have worked in such jobs, most of whom were older programmers with decades of experience under their belt.

And I said that any novice jobs that do exist appeared to be exceedingly rare, and that I didn't expect that they would pay especially well compared to, say, a PHP coding position.

That is based on whom I have known personally, and my experience in what the industry is doing. My claims would have been just as valid (or invalid) if I had been a hiring manager or a QA tester, and never done any professional programming work at all, as it was about how common jobs involving assembly programming are. Hell, even if I had just been a content editor on a career site such a Monster or LinkedIn, it would have been enough for me to give meaningful anecdotal evidence, and while anecdotal evidence isn't proof, it can be supportive of a claim such as "no, assembly programming isn't a necessary skill for all programmers".

Wow, that wasn't a very nice thing to say @igor.

Getting back on the topic. Most likely, they'd expect you to know basic programming, algorithms, and some theory behind computer architecture, but specifically writing in machine code or assembly, I doubt it.

It could depend though, the kind of position you are applying for. A person who has done their courses properly and practiced enough programming in university will be able to figure their way out through documentation and write assembly for pretty much any CPU. It's not rocket science.

As a disclaimer, I've never given a software developer interview, and I doubt I will ever considering I realized long ago software wasn't really my thing.

Many thanks to all that responded correctly.

I do not consider the topic resolved because maybe will always exist better answers.

Schol-R-LEA wrote:
If the problem is that @igorov70 doesn't believe me on this, well, (semi-)objective evidence isn't hard to find. If we look at the TIOBE Index, we find that assembly language in general - not any specific assembly language, but as a category - ranks 16th in 'popularity', at 1.7% of distribution based on the number of programmers experienced in it and the number of positions listed for it.

While this ranking isn't entirely objective, and does call for some interpretation, it does indicate that assembly language is not a necessary skill for programmers in general, which is what the OP, @ManHobby, asked about.

Schol-R-LEA, the TIOBE Index is really legitimate?

Reference: https://blog.timbunce.org/2008/04/12/ti ... tatistics/

manhobby wrote:Schol-R-LEA, the TIOBE Index is really legitimate?

Reference: https://blog.timbunce.org/2008/04/12/ti ... tatistics/

Meh, as legitimate as any other source I know of, and more than many. As that page points out, it has limits and flaws; even in the absence of deliberate bias, any data collection and analysis will carry assumptions about the data and the appropriate sources thereof, biases introduced by the procedures and the tools applied, etc. While a lot of the analytical tools are aimed at reducing the effects of these flaws, they are always present.

However, the original question was pretty course-grained; I think that TIOBE's listings are accurate enough to at least show that not all programmers use, or need to use, assembly language, and that it isn't particularly common as part of application programming.

Mind you, it isn't a part of web programming at all in general; the reasons for this should be pretty self-evident. Even if you were to argue that the WebAssembly intermediate form counts as an assembly language (which is about the same as arguing that JVM bytecode is machine code), that has limited penetration in the market to date, and many web devs have specialized in either JavaScript or PHP throughout their careers, often focusing on just one framework or CMS at that.

This isn't to say assembly programming isn't worth learning; I think a lot of the trouble we have with program inefficiency and security holes come from a poor understanding of the underlying hardware, which a course in assembly language would go far in clearing up for some programmers. But it was only required in the very earliest days, before high-level languages existed at all. There are plenty of now-retired COBOL and RPG III programmers who never wrote a line of assembly over the span of a 30 or 40 year career.

(OK, so calling RPG III a programming language is a bit of a stretch, but report generators of that era did generally involve a certain amount of actual programming, unlike markup languages such as plain, unscripted HTML.)

Schol-R-LEA wrote: However, the original question was pretty course-grained; I think that TIOBE's listings are accurate enough to at least show that not all programmers use, or need to use, assembly language, and that it isn't particularly common as part of application programming.

And of course, that percentage / position on the index goes down even further when you consider that all the various assembly languages have been lumped together as if "Assembly Language" were a programming language.

Cheers,
Adam