Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

I was worried this was only going to be a discussion of x86 assembly. Pleasantly surprised it included 6502 and RISC-V. It's worth reading even if you're not a teenager.



I'm glad you liked it! By a teenagers' guide I meant it was written by teens (including me: I'm 17). What do you think of the warehouse analogy?


Can't speak for the OP but I really liked it. It reminded me a bit of the computer game Human Resource Machine[0], which creates a mini assembly language that you use to handle a "production line" of incoming numbers.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/375820/Human_Resource_Mac...


This is a great way to accidentally learn assembly language! I was so amused that a designer friend of mine who swore they could never learn to program solved this game and in certain cases, more optimally than myself, and I have a fair amount of experience in assembly.


I love it! There's also a mobile version apparently.


ooh thanks for sharing that game


What a remarkable group of people you are.

Also I didn’t realize Rollercoaster Tycoon was primarily written in Assembly. That’s nuts.


Steve Gibson (grc.com) uses assembly for most (all?) of the software he distributes.

For example, his DNS Nameserver Benchmarking utility[1] is 160 KB and when you download it, it's a single uncompressed executable and has a decent win32 UI. It will run any version of Windows going back to Windows 95.

Could you even run a mid-90's era macOS or KDE+Linux executable on a current Mac or Linux machine? (I don't think Gnome even existed yet).

[1]: https://www.grc.com/dns/benchmark.htm


Not great not terrible. Analogies aren't that useful IMO, so it's cute but might not be a useful pedagogical aid.

Conceptual flaws (mainly down the line rather than introductory):

One issue with it down the line is that processors spend a lot of their design budgets avoiding carting memory around. You don't have to mention that explicitly but in my skim reading I would've (if I were writing it) tried to emphasize something more akin to a postal sorting room than a warehouse as per se.

Maybe that's too advanced, but I understood it when I was 18 or 19 so YMMV.

One interesting demo is to see how much assembly you can fit in a single memory access latency.


The warehouse analogy was great. You and your co-writers did a fantastic job.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: