heya all, i have a problem. At college i am stuck with what to take in the second year. i have to take VB in year 2, but the only other programming option is assembler language. is it worth leraning this? and if poss can you tell me why it is good/bad to learn it. any help would be greatly apperciated. thanks in advance, meta Don''t tell me my computers slow, all computers run at the same speed... with the power off.

Assembly is great for optimization, I think that if you want to get a job in the Videogame industry, knoledge of assembly language would help you get a good job.

I say take it, its well worth it.

I think that even if it is not much used today, it is really great to learn assembly language. It is usefull for hard optimisation. I think that assembly language is really the best language to learn how to programm, I mean it forces you to think your programm before writing anything more than any other. It gives you experience you cannot acquire with VB.
If I were you I would take assembly with no hesitation. VB is surely good too but I think it doesn''t give you enough control as it is based on someone else work.
If you want to get a job as database programmer (call to ODBC or things like that), you may choose VB but in any other case learning assembly would serve you much.

(Sorry for my bad english)

This topic is widely debated within the game development circles.

There are arguments for and against the use of assembler, but I find that alot of the arguments against are of the form "Assembler is too hard to do anything usefull with". Well, who ever said programming was going to be easy? If you really want to understand what your program is doing and how the processor works then there is no better way than using assembler. And assembler really isn''t that hard! Once you''ve grasped the fact that you have registers and a stack and "this instruction moves the value in this register to this point in memory" then your sorted. There aren''t even that many instructions you have to know off by heart, and there are always references around.

And we haven''t even got to the fact that if you want to do anything usefull with MMX, 3DNow!, SSE, SSE2 or whatever then you are going to have to use assembler somewhere down the line.
(Once you have the optimisation bug, it doesn''t go away easily!)

In my opinion if I had the chance to learn assembler (again ) at uni then i''d kiss my lecturer, do an Irish jig and run round singing "All your base are belong to us" at the top of my voice!

I think if you don''t do it - you''ll regret it.

LOL, thanks all for your help

Don''t tell me my computers slow, all computers run at the same speed... with the power off.

Optimization is great and all but IMHO the reason to learn assembly is to make yourself a better debugger.

How many times have you been staring at a perfectly valid seeming piece of C/C++ code and can''t figure out why it''s crashing? How many people come to this board and post thier code because they can''t figure it out? The answer to both questions is "lots". If you knew assembly you could switch to that view and see *exactly* what is going on and probably get a lot of insight into the problem

-Mike

its "assembly" you fucking idiots, the assembler assembles the assembly, get it?

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its "assembly" you fucking idiots, the assembler assembles the assembly, get it?

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does it actually matter that much to you little man?

take assembly, I did.
I have had Assembly, C++, Java, and Perl

"I pity the fool, thug, or soul who tries to take over the world, then goes home crying to his momma."
- Mr. T

Programmers don''t learn assembly because they need to optimize their programs, they learn assembly because the need to know how the processor works.

This is why I call them Visual Basic users and not Visual Basic programmers.