alt Hacker NewsI remember when everyone bemoaned the kids not knowing assembly language. How can anyone understand software if you don’t know assembly?
“Kids these days don’t work as hard / know as much / value the important things” is as tired as it is universal.
Replies
> How can anyone understand software if you don’t know assembly?
I'm genuinely curious how someone who never wrote a program in assembly, or debugged a program machine instruction by machine instruction, can really understand how software works. My working hypothesis is most of them don't and actually it's fine because they don't need it.
The time may come when we can treat regular programming as a lower layer niche field the way we treat assembly today.
I don't think we're close to that time yet. Just like as a kid I was told to prove my work by hand even if I could do it in my head, and just like we learned how to do calculus without a calculator and then learned how to use the calculator to get the same result, I think we still need the software field to learn programming concepts independent of the use of AI to create code.
I don't think you can be a good "prompt engineer" for solid software in 2026 if you don't understand programming concepts and software architecture and flow.
OK sure, but back when old heads were complaining about the kids not knowing assembly, those same kids knew C or Fortran or something.
In 2026, if you call yourself a developer and can't solve FizzBuzz without help, it's hard to argue that you know anything useful at all.