Comment Re:Kill it Oracle (Score 1) 338
I don't really get why people emphasize to be able to program in assembler. Or machine code
Says a lot.
says nothing at all. using C++ or C# or Java is a conceptual skill quite apart from machine level programming. Everything from threading to object/data maintenance to looping is different in a fundamental way.
I'm one of those "uneducated" (my background is Electronics, not CompSci) java programmers doing mostly business applications. I would only assert my competence. I also entered machine code in Heathkit ET3400 as well as C= Vic20/128. I repaired arcade video games like Defender and MsPackman also.
People learn what they're interested by and what they are required. The "average" anybody is not going to excite... talk about red-herring...
Do you really believe a programmer who can program in Java or even Visual Basic is incapable of learning assembler?
Bit of a red herring there. Capable of learning? Probably they are capable of learning. Do they have a desire to learn it? Probably not. Are they capable of learning it well? Maybe. Are they capable of understand the overall implications of some of the code they may generate at this level? Its iffy if we're talking about the average Java coder.
The truth of the matter is that C and below programming is really not necessary to the majority of today's programmers. I also modified xmodem on a coherent system where I had dial up. I did that to skip the 64, 128, 256 progression it did to bring up to speed. most of my transfers were 1k or greater and starting at 1024 made a huge difference in the kind of quick transfers I needed to do. I got my first job in software programming by showing the place in that C source code that I modified... why and how.
Even today I think the better, elegant solution eluded me at the time. But it worked; both in a pragmatic and preparatory sense.
That's all starkly irrelevant to job-health today for me though.