Assembly language programming in unix environment

[Kipton Moravec]

On Mon, 2009-09-21 at 12:20 -0400, Dick Dowdell wrote:

> Freeburn,
> 
> At one time, your assertion that learning assembly language helps one
> to understand processors, was useful and true---I once made a good
> living writing IBM 360/370 BAL code.  I question whether it is of use
> to 99% of the people programming today.  Software development
> productivity has risen in proportion to the increase in the level of
> abstraction at which the programmer works.  Higher development
> productivity means lower development costs and shortened time to
> market---both very important in business.
> 
> Most of the systems I've worked on in the last 10 years have been
> written in Java.  Not because Java is the most machine-efficient
> language, but because, when written properly, it can maximize code
> reusability and maximize portability among operating systems and
> database management systems.  Computers used to be expensive and labor
> cheap.  Now the reverse is true.  My advice to a new programmer is to
> focus on software engineering skills not specific programming
> languages.  If one is a good software engineer, one can pick up new
> languages quickly.  If one is a poor software engineer, one will write
> poor code, no matter what the language.
> 
> Regards,
> Dick Dowdell
> 

Unfortunately reuse of code and not code efficiency is being done in
operating systems more and more too. That is why Vista is such big and
heavy operating system. They do not care about performance, but ease of
coding, so machines that run fine with XP choke under Vista. 

The tendency is the same direction in Linux, however there are more
people working to make it work faster, so the code bloat is more
restrained. It is there, but the rate of increase is much lower than
with Microsoft.

An example is the difference between Ubuntu and Xubuntu. Xubuntu was
supposed to be a lighter weight version of Ubuntu, for older machines.
It used X windows instead of Gnome. Turns out Xubuntu takes more RAM
than Ubuntu. Probably because there are more people working on Ubuntu to
make it more efficient. And not so many people are working on Xubuntu,
so they worry about just getting something to work and code reuse.  




-- 


Kipton Moravec AE5IB .- . ..... .. -... 
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