Comment Re:Dreaded (Score 1) 139
I really do think they should teach some sort of assembler for a very simple architecture in the introductory curriculum for computer science.
They do not?
I got my Master of Engineering in Computer Science in 1997, and I had three or four classes that touched on Assembly, including one where we rolled our own, for a basic microprocessor we designed ourselves. That was purely theoretical, but another class's final project included writing a compiler for a simple procedural language to Assembly.
Now, I went to college having disassembled and commented one or two different BIOSes, and having written PC drivers for custom controllers for the Bulgarian People's Army, so I had a head start, but I am pretty sure that the above mentioned classes would have given me decent understanding of what an Assembly Language is, and how to use it if needed.
This said, since the 90s, I have never written in Assembly, except for maybe 100 lines to speed up some time-critical searches through a custom data structure. But I have done a fair bit of disassembling, to figure what the hell was going on in some device drivers in an automated cell (robot arms + CNC lathes and mills)
But frankly, this may just be my being a old fart. I have met young programmers who did not understand stacks, so...