Great Programmers are assembly language experts
Jack Gannsle discusses on embeeded.com whether Randall Hyde's statement "Great Programmers are assembly language experts"
My colleagues at Tipperary Institute who teach Computer Architecture and Computer Systems Hardware would agree with some of his findings.
From programming the Intel IXP1200 Network Processor which uses a hybrid of C and Assembler I found myself nodding with agreement several times, while reading this article.
Assembler programmers have an obsession with performance and constraints that are often unheard off by Java and Visual Basic devlopers.
Since the introduction of J2ME, programmer writing apps for mobile phones have suddenly become aware of these constraints. As a number of our students found out while developing their third and fourth year projects
Jack goes one step further than Mr. Hyde. He maintains that you should not structure your high level source code like assembly language, and never think in assembly when cranking C/C++ code. But for time-critical sections do examine the generated code. Look for simple optimizations, be wary of calls to runtime routines. Always instrument ISRs and other performance-bound functions to measure their performance.
