Why should I understand assembly language

Question

Nowadays there are compilers that can compile different high level languages into assembly language. But as a programmer is it detrimental in any way to leave out assembly coding in your skills???

Answer 1

"Why should I understand assembly language"?

I don't think that most of us would try to convince you that you should. (Otherwise, we'd have a tutorial on it, just to avoid appearing hypocritical. 😉)

"But as a programmer is it detrimental in any way to leave out assembly coding in your skills???"

It really depends on the kind of programming you want to do, but in the vast majority of cases, no. Even most things that need to run very quickly only go as low as C these days.

What would really help most aspiring programmers these days is being resourceful enough to find things they need on the Internet. For example, a quick search revealed:

https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/13287/why-do-we-need-assembly-language

It addresses your sentiment, I believe.

I hope this helps!

Answer 2

It might be useful to know assembly for certain low level tasks like operating system or certain driver programming. For most other tasks it's not important. I even think that less than 5% of all programmers really know the assembly language, so you don't need to learn it either.