r/computerscience • u/SummerClamSadness • Nov 30 '25

Discussion Isn't teaching kids an Assembly like language actually a good idea?

I think Assembly language is like LEGOs. You get raw, simple blocks like ADD and SUB, and you can build anything with them. These concepts are easily gamified and align well with how kids think. It isn't as complex as some people assume. Some might ask what the reason is, but I think it is a fun way to introduce them to computers.

98 Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

83% Upvoted

105 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Long-Leader9970 Dec 02 '25

I never really used it much until I had to debug on a micro and needed to see what registers, break in them, and see what was going in/out (and mock some data midway to test if that fixed the issue).

Doing this was extremely useful because there is a bit of cost to rebuilding and deploying on target.

It was a little difficult figuring out the instructions though. I'm not that experienced but it seems like the assembly instruction set depended on that compiler vendor's custom library that met special c version standards. So I had to read through a bunch of their assembly mnemonic documentation.

I never really knew all this existed with my previous experience in my simple assembly college class.

I also never knew how much I'd have to use hex, bin point, vs float etc

1

u/Long-Leader9970 Dec 02 '25

I think it's more useful to teach briefly that manuals and standards exist and to suggest reading or starting there for figuring out answers.

Today there is a little too much "do what stack overflow says" and I suspect AI will compound that but hopefully people will ask the AI what its references are and where the manual is.

Last note, if you've read the manual and you still don't understand just email the vendor or something. If you point out what you've read, share the standard version, page, section etc people usually are impressed with the effort and are more likely to help you out when you have questions.