On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 23:48 +0100, Philippa Cowderoy wrote:
On Wed, 10 Oct 2007, Andrew Coppin wrote:
(I'm less sold on whether you really need to learn a particular dialect well enough to *program* in it...)
If you don't then you won't be able to see how complicated things actually get done. It's also an important exercise in abstracting things and keeping something understandable when the system you're building is fighting back against it.
As you might imagine, I agree with Philippa. You can certainly be a competent programmer without being "able" to program in assembly, but there is a definite step in understanding between having an idea of what is happening in assembly and being confident in your ability to write non-trivial programs in it.