Siliconchef by Brian Richardson
Dear Mr. Scoble … thanks for making me feel old …
Robert Scoble wrote a post about obsolete skills, which has spawned an Obsolete Skills wiki. Yeah, assembly language programming made the list pretty quickly. Fine, be that way … just try starting your computer with out me. Yeah, thought so. Even the new-fangled Unified EFI (UEFI) products that I’m working with to slowly put my old product to pasture requires a little assembly language skill. See also security products, performance-optimized drivers, household appliances and anything automotive with electronic timing.
And on a technical note … obsolete skills in a wiki? Come on! You should be archiving obsolete skills on a Gopher site. Now get off my lawn … damn kids.
*ahem* The real issue with defining any skill as “obsolete” is context. Building a fire isn’t obsolete if you don’t live in a country with central heating, or that fire is used to boil the water you want to drink while you wait for the water treatment plant to be completed upstream.
Yeah, some skills have gone the way of reel-to-reel tape recorder … something I have actually used, not because it was the technology of my day but because it was what we had at my college radio station. Learning these older skills brings some good knowledge, like the fundamentals of how new technology work. That time editing videotape on A-B roll makes me a much better at non-linear video editing on a dual-core computer system.
I learn new skills all the time, which is nice when it comes time to pay for the house every month. But that house has horses next to the cars, goats that we have once used to make cheese, and a coop for chickens that lay brown eggs we can cook when we’re not in the mood to microwave a frozen breakfast burrito.
The lesson: Know when you’re out of date, but be careful when you disrespect the old school.
Yeah, I don’t buy a lot of what got thrown up on the wiki. That’s doubly true for all of the programming languages. I have some friends who make a lot of money maintaining legacy systems, and it’s because they know how to deal with older hardware and are fluent in languages like COBOL. Hell, they even listed BASIC, which shares much of the syntax with Visual Basic.
–rant mode on–
Actually, if people want to believe that assembly language is obsolete, then I say more power to them! That just guarantees continued employment for guys like me and Brian when their boxes stop working for reasons they can’t figure out.
I don’t find the need to write much new assembly code these days, but sometimes you just gotta know exactly what the machine is being told to do… even in systems written exclusively in a high-level language. Compilers don’t always do what you expect them to, and subtle bugs can be almost invisible at the high level. I’ve seen a case where an “if (pointer_a < pointer_b)” statement looked like it was making exactly the wrong decision. We single-stepped through that one umpteen times trying to figure out what was going on. Turning on the assembly made it obvious that an incorrect compiler setting was causing the pointers to be treated as signed values.