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nickdesaulniers / ama

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Do you think everyone should understand low-level programming? #3

Open bnjbvr opened 9 years ago

bnjbvr commented 9 years ago

Do you think everyone should understand low-level programming (assembly / C), in order to be good at programming?

nickdesaulniers commented 9 years ago

Not to begin with, but if they want to have a career as a programmer, I would consider it a good investment to eventually make.

I used to argue with my CS professors, they started out teaching Python -> C++ -> C -> Assembly. I advocated to go the other way around so that you could better appreciate higher level abstractions. After wanting to bash your brains out writing assembly, C would seem amazingly high level! The professors disagreed; too many students dropped out of CS when starting lower level.

At some point, it's all arcana and doesn't matter, but it's personally interesting to me and might be worthwhile to others. I do have a habit of trying to master and learn everything I can about topics that I find interesting...