This is a card in Dave's Virtual Box of Cards.

Assembly language programming

Created: 2022-09-07 Updated: 2022-10-12

After 25 years, I’ve started writing programs in assembly language again. I like it.

(I’m going to abbreviate "high-level language" to HLL here.)

Some of the highlights so far:

Realizing that most of the abstractions in HLLs are just figments of our imagination. The CPU doesn’t know anything about them.
Assembly isn’t actually hard (the language is much easier than most HLLs)
Even on x86, you can do everything you want with surprisingly little knowledge.
The abstraction is just way different and you’re often doing things that are straight up illegal or impossible in HLLs.
Geek cred and people seem to figure you must know what you’re doing (even if you have no idea what you’re doing).