• Naich@lemmings.world
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    5 months ago

    I have programmed by looking up op codes in a table on a sheet of paper and entering the hex codes into an EPROM programmer.

      • Naich@lemmings.world
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        5 months ago

        Fucking ancient. This was for a Z80 based system using discreet logic for addressing and IO, constructed on a wire-wrapped board.

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      If you want some modern day fun with this, try the Zachtronics programming games; TIS-100, Shenzhen I/O, and Exapunks.

      Or, my personal favorite I only discovered somewhat recently, try Turing Complete. You start by designing all your logic gates from just a negate gate IIRC. You eventually build up an ALU and everything else you need and then create your own computer. Then you define your own assembly language and have to write programs in your assembly language that run on the computer you’ve designed to complete different tasks. It’s a highly underrated game, although it takes a certain type of person to enjoy.

      • WldFyre@lemm.ee
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        5 months ago

        Turing Complete looks really interesting! How polished is it? Just looked it up and saw it was in early access

        • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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          5 months ago

          I would say it’s very polished. It does everything you’d expect and has some nice QoL features. There was work on a big update that’d improve performance and things, but the last information about that was from Aug of last year as far as I can tell. That’s not a big deal though. The game works fine without it.

      • Zangoose@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Another interesting low-level interpreter/emulated system to look into for anyone else trying to get started with this type of thing is the CHIP-8! It’s a pretty basic 8/16-bit instruction set (there are 35 opcodes, the instructions themselves are mostly simple) and there are tons of detailed guides on making one and writing roms for them.

    • notabot@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      Ah, memories. That was me on a Spectrum. It’s all fun and games until you forget to save (to tape) and your code hangs the machine, losing everything.

    • GenosseFlosse@lemmy.nz
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      5 months ago

      When I was young, we didn’t have hex codes, we only had 1 and 0s. One time we where all out of 1s, and I had to code a whole Database system with only 0s!

          • Victor@lemmy.world
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            5 months ago

            Exactly. For every level of abstraction, the abstractor is the high level and the abstractee is the lower level. Those aren’t real words perhaps, but you get what I’m saying. It’s all relative along the chain of abstraction.

            • Ziglin@lemmy.world
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              5 months ago

              Is it a chain though? I think it’s more of a branching network that (almost?) always is stopped at quantum physics and it’s theories or some form philosophy.

              • Victor@lemmy.world
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                5 months ago

                My mental model of it is a chain, yes. But you can define it however you like. It’s just steps in some direction.

                Maybe a cake would suit someone the best.

        • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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          5 months ago

          It’s higher than machine code. It’s degrees of highness. Any abstraction technically makes it high level.

          • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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            5 months ago

            It’s not really abstraction though. It is more like syntactic sugar. In stead of 1000111011 you say ADD, but it is still the exact same thing. There is no functional, prgrammatical benefit of one over the other. It’s just that asm is readable by humans.

            At least thats as far as I understand asm. I haven’t gone beyond NandToTetris

    • Cethin@lemmy.zip
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      5 months ago

      I would argue they don’t know what that means really. Assembly is pretty much a mapping of words to machine code. It’s just a way to make machine code easier to read. It doesn’t actually change how it works.

      A compiler re-arranges and modifies things so what you write isn’t the same as the final program that is created. With assembly it is. It’s not really an abstraction, but a translation. It doesn’t move you further from the machine, it only makes it so you’re speaking the same language.

  • IsoSpandy@lemm.ee
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    5 months ago

    When I learnt programming (back in early 2000s) the textbook said C is a high level 3rd generation language with 4th gen languages being something higher (I don’t remember what examples were given specifically). This is back when the java applets and action script for flash were the hot things. How I miss the days without the world being cursed by JS.

    • MonkderDritte@feddit.de
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      5 months ago

      I think C was 2nd, 3. is Java and Python, 4 SQL and 5th would be some hypothetical AI instruction language?

    • Lmaydev@programming.dev
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      5 months ago

      Java applets and flash were an absolute security nightmare of the highest degree.

      You were just running applications on your computer.

      If you had to download and run an application on your computer to view a website now people would lose their minds (and rightly so)

  • umbraroze@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    I mean, C is a high level language? Now, sure, C isn’t a super expressive language and every C statement compiles to very few assembly instructions comparatively speaking, but it has a whole lot of stuff that assembly doesn’t have. Like nice loops and other control structures and such, and not worry about which processor registers are used.

  • 30p87@feddit.de
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    5 months ago

    In the modern world it’s completely subjective.
    The lowest-level language is probably ASM/machine code, as many people at least edit that regularly, and the highest-level would be LLMs. They are the shittiest way to program, yes, but technically you just enter instructions and the LLM outputs eg. Python, which is then compiled to bytecode and run. Similar to how eg. Java works. And that’s the subjective part; many people (me included) don’t use LLMs as the only way to program, or only use them for convenience and some help, therefore the highest level language is probably either some drag-and-drop UI stuff (like scratch), or Python/JS. And the lowest level is either C/C++ (because “no one uses ASM anyway”), or straight up machine code.