Nostalgia for Assembly Programming

Where has assembly programming gone to? I remember growing
up in the '80s and the B. Dalton bookstores (remember
those?) being shelved full of assembly language books for
the Commodore 64 personal computer. Nowadays, it seems
that everything is too complicated for all but the most
brilliant minds to dabble in assembly code. And as an
outdated programming language, most don't even bother to
familiarize themselves with it these days, given that
nothing much runs off assembly anymore.

Then again, technology has so improved that the principal
benefit of assembly language, its speed, may be irrelevant,
while the inherent incomprehensibility of the language (and
you think C++ is hard) remains a liability.

Computer languages are fascinating. And despite the
obscure "look" of assembly, I remain intrigued by it.
Assembly languages were first developed as
second-generation languages that freed programmers from
tedium such as remembering numeric codes and calculating
addresses. This lead to an increase in programming
productivity, and I surmise that it is this very reason
that assembly has been dropped along with the rest of the
'80s. Advanced hardware has made high-level languages less
cost-intensive in terms of computational cycles, allowing
instruction that resembles a modicum of English. Assembly
languages have simply become obsolete under newer
high-level programming languages.

Ah, yes, the '80s. When even amateur programmers could
still alter the sizes of the paddles in classic Pong. When
a programmer could still do it all himself and become a
millionaire overnight with an instant runaway hit, such as
David Crane of Pitfall! fame. This title sold over four
million copies at a time when home video game consoles were
not as common as today, taking only ten minutes to conceive
and ten thousand hours (a little over a year) to program.
It was coded entirely in assembly, of course, as no
high-level languages existed for consoles back then. This
then the game has spawned several sequels, including
Pitfall: The Lost Expedition for the last generation of
consoles released in 2004, and again rereleased for the
Nintendo Wii in 2008.

It was a time that will never be again, when mere hobbyists
and professional programmers were not too different.
Professionals were really only those hobbyists who were
skilled enough to be paid for their work. Hobbyist
programmers have not gone extinct though. In fact, as of
recently, amateur programming has experienced a renaissance
of sorts, especially in the field of mobile technology.
Most smartphones - the iphone for example - run
applications, which are now open sourced, meaning that
anyone with the skills to program a decent app can do so
and make it available for download to the general public.
This system has opened up an entire market of obscure or
specific applications for all different purposes.

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Written by Paul Wise, who has used assembly programming
languages, recommends http://www.clickonblogs.com/ for more
reading on programming for the Commodore 64.

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