Learning Assembly in component framework age
How many times have you heard the statement “Yeah, this program (written in J2EE or .NET) is slow, but that means you need better hardware”, and after you bought the best hardware out there (save the bestest), you found out the program is still slow, the algorithms are still taking ungodly amount of time to return values, the interface still suffers from delays and generally the speed of execution increased maybe by 10% while you just doubled the hardware platform?
Randall Hyde tells why learning ASM is still a good idea. Hyde is the author of the famous Art of Assembly Language Programming (freely available on the Web for so many years). To quote the article he wrote for OReilly:
With every new application, the programmer writes the software slower than it ought to run, on whatever current CPU they’re using, believing that future CPU performance boosts will solve their problems. Of course, by the time the CPUs are fast enough to execute their software, the programmer has “enhanced” the software, and is now depending on yet another future version of the CPU. The cycle repeats almost endlessly, with CPU performance never really catching up with the demands of the software, until finally, the software’s life comes to an end and the programmer begins the cycle anew with a different application.