Assembly not required
I've been messing around with x86 intel nasm assembly lately. I have no real reason too other than pure educational purposes. I have no intention of reverse engineering anything, I just like knowing I can if I want too. Aside from that, it's a please to write code with such a low level language. Lately, I've been harboring, resenting, gripping about web programming languages. My first complaint came way back when, while I was doing a lot of Perl programming at eBay. I hated using some of these dumb PPM or CPAN modules. Although you hardly needed to know how they implemented the class to use it, I had to know. I had to know why, so when I'd look over the code, I'd often slam my face against my desk at the otherwise automated procedures they laid before me. While great for the programmer and maintainer of the module because they did all the initial work upfront, its use hardly seemed worth it. The magic method took all the fun and understanding out of programming for me. Ruby does that to me too. While Rails is an exceptional framework and I work twice as fast, programming as a whole is going to the way of 'Plug and Play'. API programming is not programming, I hate to break the bad news, but it's true. I like writing instructions and dwelling on problems, that's me... but as a whole of an industry, do we really want to go this way. We're eliminating ourselves from the very jobs we love. If I see one more magic parser, I'm going to freak the "F" out. Well in truth maybe not, but at the very least the next person I talk to better know what's going on behind the scenes. That's why I'm loving Objective-C and additionally moved to Assembly. At this point, it's purely for fun, nothing more like I said. There's valuable information to be had if decisions weren't already decided for us. If I'm ever to design a new language and do something with Assembly, it'd be to place a restriction on what you can and can't do with modules.
;end of rant!
