I haven’t had any reason to write assembly by hand for quite a while, but the other day a deep hardware geek friend of mine asked for an opinion on an instruction set for an architecture he is working on — and of course that means using his assembly instructions directly.
I had forgotten what that is like. It is common today to hear people who have never written anything in assembly put C in the same category as assembly, having themselves heard that C is “low level”. C is certainly lower level than, say, Python or Erlang, but its a far cry from assembly. Saying “low level” isn’t the same thing as saying “hardware level” or “lower than…”. Abstractions are always relative to the level of your problem of the moment.
Perhaps C is metaphorically comparable to assembly if you are programming in userland and your major concerns are stretching background images or including on-click sound effects or whatever. But that doesn’t compare to assembly. What is most interesting about C is that compilers can be written that abstract away the quirks of different hardware instruction sets and make programs magically portable.
Of course, the phrase “portable” is in the same boat as the phrase “low level” these days. If its not interpreted or compiled to bytecode (or in the case of the ultra ignorant, if its not Java) then folks who have no experience in compiled languages will think you must be mistaken for using the phrase “portable”. Some more Java-hype driven misconceptions that haven’t yet died out*.
After a long stint in the world of garbage collection and either extremely strong typing or completely dynamic typing it is funny to think of everything as an integer again. Assembly is not a bad way to deal with hardware-level problems (provided the instruction set doesn’t suck). A good set of machine instructions is precisely the sort of thing needed to solve the sort of problems you encounter when dealing with specific device behaviors or, say, bootstrapping a compiler for a simple language like C. An assembly with a decent syntax provides mnemonic devices in a way that makes dealing with those machine instructions enormously easier. (But I wouldn’t try writing a graphical MMORPG in pure assembly.)
C is excellent for providing abstractions at the level required for portable systems or limited-feature/limited-aspect general programming (and I still wouldn’t try writing a graphical MMORPG in pure C). Building abstractions up from there is a sensible thing to do, of course, and this permits us to stack abstractions up high enough that we can almost talk in human(ish) terms about human problems with computers and do neat things. Deciding whether a particular tool or form of expression is appropriate for a particular set of problems is all about the nature and level of the problems and is rarely a judgment on the tools themselves.
This is why I don’t like monolingual or even single-paradigm programmers. They have been tricked into thinking that mental overhead is a fixed quantity, a universal constant from which all other difficulty and complexity is derived. This is a handicap which can only be surmounted by forcing oneself to explore outside the comfort zone provided by FavLangX or FavParadigmY.
[* What is funny about that is C is far more portable than Java. “Compile once, run anywhere” doesn’t actually solve a problem that anybody has in the real world. It is trivial to compile a program once per architecture it will run on, or even once per platform. After all, that is how the runtime environments for interpreted/bytecode languages get published in the first place.]