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0 pointswreckimnaked13y ago0 comments

I mean, it's always useful to know what's happening under the hood, but it's not always realistic to expect that to happen. I don't think the average C programmer need to know assembly any more than the average Ruby programmer needs to know C.

I disagree. Given that C exposes you to some hardware details that are abstracted when developing in some higher level language such as Ruby, for instance having to deal with overflow on signed/unsigned types and register variables (I know that compilers will mostly ignore that, but it's still a language feature).

The average Ruby programmer, on it's turn, can perfectly live without knowing C programming. A more accurate analogy would be to a Ruby programmer to know about the language implementation being using (MRI, JRuby, Rubinius, etc.)

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prophetjohn13y ago· 1 in thread

Signed vs. unsigned data types isn't an artifact of assembly language. It's more so one of digital data representation. I think that knowledge is just as useful to a C programmer as a Ruby programmer. Fire up irb and type 0.1 + 0.2, for instance. You covered what I would have said about the register keyword, but you're right, it's essentially impossible to understand that language "feature" without having a basic understanding of the CPU.

wreckimnakedOP13y ago

Indeed. My main point was that programming C requires more knowledge about the "layers" underneath its execution than higher level languages such as Ruby.

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