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685327594 t1_itval9k wrote

Reply to comment by Opus-the-Penguin in [OC] Salaries Distribution by Programming Languages in 2022 by __dacia__

The big takeaway I see here is all my classes programming in assembly were pretty worthless. Are higher level languages used everywhere now?

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Opus-the-Penguin t1_itvbpb8 wrote

Good question. I mean SOMEBODY has to be doing the ultra low level stuff in order for the high level to work, right? But yeah, back in the day, the machine language guys were the real he-man coders and the COBOL guys were just BASIC programmers with a car payment.

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685327594 t1_itvcr71 wrote

Nobody really has to program in assembly unless they are making a new compiler.

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Pert02 t1_itw5oad wrote

Or when you need high performance on embedded applications. Lets say you need to do signal processing on an embedded system with a DSP. Thats all assembly.

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devoxel t1_itwqpr1 wrote

Understanding assembly does make a better programmer IMO. It gives you intuition about memory access & stack. You can get there without assembly but its much easier when you've dug through the mud yourself, at least in my experience.

Plus languages like Rust are surprisingly low level, even though it's advanced in terms of syntax and symbolic representation

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lucun t1_itxyroh wrote

Depends on where you work at in the stack, but normally yes higher level languages are everywhere and assembly is very uncommon. I've only had to code in assembly once in my career, and it was for a very specific piece of equipment to do an overly specialized 200% performance optimization that the C++ compiler wasn't intelligent enough to do for an overly specialized use case for that CPU.

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