Assembly language

This was all new to me.

And the way I made that work was I created a framework in Assembler.

I created a software framework that in hindsight looked a lot like encapsulation and object oriented programming where the task of the other two team members was very limited.

They just had to do the thing that was specific to this level.

Mm-hmm.

So first one, and you can see the source code, and it was written in Assembly, is a one, uh, from, uh, Dennis and Kerrigan in, uh, '71, where they wrote Unix.

I wasn't born.

Uh, but you can see the, you can find the Assembly code online easily.

I can share it with you later if you want.

But, uh, if you see how it work, it's, it was working the same way.

I'm a software engineer 'cause I know how to use this programming language," but I'd argue you're probably an engineer if you can go down the stack and you have that ability, and you have, like, a good, good understanding of some of it at least, right? And then you can learn the rest.

And I would also say that one of the other things that, uh, we do in the class is teach how to read Assembly language.

And people often ask, what...

Like, "Why?" Like, "You know, Assembly language, what would I ever need that for?" Uh, there's a very good reason for it, and that is that everything else that you might use doesn't tell you anything about what the CPU is actually receiving.

You know, if I look at a Java program, if I look at a C program, if I look at, uh, Haskell, OCaml, whatever, right, uh, Rust, all I'm seeing is input to a compiler.

I have no idea what the CPU's actually going to be asked to do.

If I look at the Assembly language output from that compiler, I know exactly what the CPU is being asked to do, and it's not that hard to be able to learn to read Assembly language so that you can see very quickly, is the CPU being asked to do the things that I think it should be asked to do them and in that way, right? You don't have to write it hardly ever.

Uh, it's very rare that you have to write Assembly language to do anything, um, other than s- sometimes for test purposes it's easier to do that so you don't have to try and convince a compiler to output something.

And that's the first time, in essence, in English I could do something.

So early coders were coding in a language that went away because we had a higher level language called Assembly, and then Assembly basically went away for most people and that became, um, these higher level languages.

And of course by the '70s and '80s we had very high level languages that are really thoughtful, that are in English in, in, in essence, right? So we have seen, uh, developers move to higher and higher and higher level languages where the language, uh, is, is producing, you know, thousands of lines of machine code for us.

We're not writing those thousands of lines.

Now we've progressed one more time to the actual English language of natural language.

So if I can describe it at this level, it'll write it in Python, which actually is compiling down to Assembly, which ultimately kind of converts to machine code.

And we don't see any of those layers.

So my point is we've given up seeing a variety of layers of computer programming over the years.

Wow.

Uh, I was using Assembler, uh, C#.

Uh, these were-

Okay

You're gonna see more businesses spawn because businesses now only need one ability, and that's ability to speak English.

The new programming languages, when I grew up, it was Assembler, C, et cetera.

The new programming language today is what? It's English.

You can speak to something and an application can emerge.

So what I'm gonna be doing over, uh, I have no choice really, is because it, it excites me, is I'm beginning to develop a g- understanding the, at, at the level I want to.

Remember, I program in Assembler.

So I, when I say I understand something, I, uh, for me, to me- for me to be satisfied, I have to understand, well, is the carry bit set or not? Um, so, uh, but at the same time to make it understandable.

So I think most of, you know, what, what, what I look at the things we're gonna talk about.

And as you just said, in the early days, coding was very hard.

If I think back, I started learning Assembler in the 90s.

So I'm familiar with how to try to write efficient code.

And then in order to make developers more efficient...