I agree not to go into low level programming expecting a wealth of job opportunities to suddenly open up, but I wouldn't tell people not to go there at all. Not only is assembly really fun to play around with, I feel like I've gotten a lot out of the bits of assembly I've read/written. Even though I've never written assembly code for work, being able to read the disassembly in gdb has come in handy before. Also, a lot of the subtleties of C/C++ never quite clicked for me until I had an idea of how the generated assembly would work.
It's similar to learning a functional language. I have no idea if I'll ever use Haskell professionally but learning a bit of it has been a good way to see problems and logic differently. I think both assembly and Haskell have made me a better programmer, even if I never become truly proficient in either or use them directly in my job.
Totally agree. When I taught x86 assembly in college (in the 90's), the goal of the class was to give the student a better idea of how things worked under the hood to improve their C programming, not to be an assembly programming.
Just today, I helped a coworker debugging a segmentation fault that occurred in a library where the debugging info was stripped out by looking at the assembly code.
> Just today, I helped a coworker debugging a segmentation fault that occurred in a library where the debugging info was stripped out by looking at the assembly code.
Being able to debug applications which don't have debuginfo (particularly optimized builds) is highly valuable though.
It really does give you insight into some of the lower level stuff. It won't give you the full picture but it will give you ideas about how you might be able to take better advantage of your hardware by changing how you use data.
It's similar to learning a functional language. I have no idea if I'll ever use Haskell professionally but learning a bit of it has been a good way to see problems and logic differently. I think both assembly and Haskell have made me a better programmer, even if I never become truly proficient in either or use them directly in my job.