Programming in assembly

Learning to program can be both a fun and challenging endeavor, especially when you're attempting your first programming language. In my case I started out with BASIC and fortunately that was easy to learn. Nevertheless, it may have taken me about a week to get to grips with the BASIC language, but it took me several months to code my first game - a Joust clone.

While that may have been impressive, after all I was only a kid. BASIC did have it's limitations as it was a particularly slow language. My Joust clone played like the original but it ran slower due to the limited capabilities of the language. Then, I decided to learn the assembly language that was much faster and more efficient with system resources. Unfortunately I never got round to mastering the language, but I did learn enough to put together some small applications.

Has anyone here tried to program in assembly?

 

I do know programming in assembly but had done it only at couple of occasions. Which assembly did you code in to? I worked with HLASM, which is used with IBM Mainframes.

 

Why would you try to program in assembly? From what I've heard about it is that it's a very low level language and is undeniably hard to use. BASIC is most likely one of the easiest programming languages you can learn out there. Assembly is one of the hardest if not the hardest to learn apart from pure binary.

 

If the programming for you is having to do with Forums, online communities, or writing code for developing websites, or to a good extent developing UIs for web only - you'll probably never need assembly code. But if you are working at system level, some system tweaks can be done in assembly rather easily.

And it's not low level always -- there are High-level versions of it. One such I've mentioned in my previous post. "HL" in "HLASM" stands for "High Level"!