Low-level vs. High-level programming (was My First Computer)

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"White Flame (aka David Holz)" <whiteflame52@y.a.h.o.o.com> wrote in message
news:b3qo6h$5ar$1@barad-dur.nas.com...
> "Really" <barryem@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> 1c7cf088462765c2a0e63c17ceaa1ece@news.teranews.com">news:1c7cf088462765c2a0e63c17ceaa1ece@news.teranews.com...
> > Through a 35 year programming career (I'm retired now) there was
> > never a month where something didn't make me very glad to have that
> > assembly experience, even though I never actually used assembly
> > during some years.
>
> Though I've only had a 10 year programming career (20 years of programming
> experience) doing very high-level code, I can fully agree.  You don't
> technically *need* to know low-level concepts in order to create working
> code, but it certainly helps you do it *well*, as well as helps in
debugging
> and optimization.  When doing wavelet graphics on a 68k Palm for a web
> browser, I did it all in C++, but continually looked at the generated
> assembly code and massaged the code to produce the optimum asm code from
the
> compiler, knowing how it works.

Here's a fun quote from a Microsoft employee speaking of Visual Studio .NET
at a seminar I attended: "The more we can lower the bar, the better we can
enforce good coding practices."

I was both sickened and awed by the very idea that MS, by way of this guy's
statement, had essentially told me I am too stupid to be trusted to be a
programmer.

Worse, were I to replace "I am" with "the IT industry is" in the above
sentence, I'd actually agree with that statement right now.  I think that's
directly from where IT's current slump comes: normal people (i.e.,
non-nerds) who were attracted to programming as a career because they didn't
want to be doctors or lawyers anymore, but just didn't have the mindset for
it.  At the core of all the layoffs, downsizing, shakedowns, whatever, I
think we're witnessing the computer industry shake off the burden of having
hired these people that thought computer programming meant f��ball-tables,
Sprite, and snowboarding all day.