Glacing once more at the simplistic purity of some assembly instructions, my mind quickly wonders to places which many fear. While languages which are built on its foundations may be simple at the letter, beyond, each are their own vaccuum, pulling the programmer toward their voids of complexity. Most abandon ship when confronted. "It's magic."
Computable algorithms, but can't be discussed confidently with their mother tongue. Sometimes there's no sufficient translation. C'est la vie.
But the heap, stack and registers are real. Memory alignment, cache misses, SIMD... The disparity between the machine brain and the human brain. Yet the business instruction set remains undefined. "C is portable assembly."
if (x < 6) { ... }
cmp DWORD PTR [rbp-4], 7
jg .L2
Mmmmm. Code judges differently.
How can we marry the fine details of the computer with higher level tasks?
Not with these children. They look nothing like their machine instruction parents. The human condition strikes again. Children never want to be like their parents.
Cutting down the amalgamation of the tech stack growths will require starting from the root again, so it can tumble and writher and finally consumed by an ancestor born again from the mind.
I've felt this way for a long time. Well what feels long in my short life so far. Everytime I've pursued a small Game Boy reverse engineering project, or watch a demoscene video, a pang of bewilderment and envy appears in my heart. I wanted to be those people who wrote that software, because machine instructions never age. Writing in the mother tongue of the machine means your source code is never truly lost, just a little worn, waiting for the next person to understand and execute.
Here's to the machine, because it's buried pretty fucking deep.
-- Len