Assembly language and machine code - Gary explains!

You might have heard the terms "assembly language" and "machine code" but what do they mean? Let's find out.

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[nezelg]

My husband, who was a student at MIT at the time, taught me to program in assembly language on our first date! It was a big help in understanding languages in future jobs that I had as a technical writer.

[baigadil]

last used machine code in my bachelors in computer science, we actually put little 3 pin transistors on our own toy of a PCB, created our AND, NOT, OR, NAND gates in different configuration and wrote simple arithematic operations and got happy about it! fast forward 16 years, I am doing data engineer and data science in python against big data and sometimes i get deja vu of the simplest binary operations that are happening underneath with an orchestra of more than a billion finFET transistors! its simply amazing how humans build layer upon layer over original understanding of anything all in name of efficiency and progress!

[amihartz]

I've written a lot of assembly code for the TI-83 and TI-84 calculators. They're quite nifty little pocket computers that, unlike cellphones, teachers don't question you messing around with in class. They're really slow, so the only practical way of making apps is using assembly language (Z80 Assembly specifically). I learned that and wrote a ton of apps for it. Some were practically useful for class, some were just for fun, and others were just to challenge myself. It's really fun, actually, to interact so closely with the hardware. I wrote one app where you could write out a string of music notes and duration and it could actually play them through a pair of speakers plugged into the I/O port using an adapter. This is not something you can easily do with something like Java because most high-level languages don't let you directly interact with hardware so easily. I attempted to write machine code once just for the heck of it, and I wrote a simple program that could convert numbers to their hex values. But that's about all, writing machine code is pretty pointless unless your machine is so primitive it doesn't even have an assembler yet.

[Enedrapvp]

Roller Coaster Tycoon was also written in assembly.

2 Assembler courses is a minimum at my university for any CS major (in 2016, IBM hires like 25% of graduates).

[RnBandCrunk]

The C compiler first optimizes your code (in C), then creates an assembly file from it and then the object file, which is machine code for the computer and finally an exe-file, which is basically the result of the linker going over the object file afaik.

[mrsconsolelog]

I just started my second semester with subjects related to software engineering, and about to start assembly languages in few weeks. It sounds exiting to get a glipmse, about where and how data gets storage to translate in to binary code... Thanks !

[FranciscoLopez-esfi]

It is really cool that this kind of content is also shown in Android Authority

[orionwilson]

I'm quite new, and being that I am in the process of learning this apart from a scholastic environment, this video was indeed very helpful. thank you.

[jeraldgarner]

Great explanation Gary! I'm taking my 1st Assembly Language class this week and I learn by understanding concepts visually and you are excellent at it! I remember being in electronics in Highschool, having a Vic 20 and Commodore 64, wanting a Sinclair and working to build a robot vis wire wrapping. I joined the USAF and was n communications for 8 years, then on to web design and networking in the civilian world. Programing this Assembly looks like learning Greek to me but you have helped! I hope I can learn more from you as the class progresses!

[subhashisghose]

Still somehow the best explanation of these concepts even after 6 years.

[Bob-zgzf]

oh my god, this video is pretty helpful. I watched it a while back and quit watching it cuz I was lost by the time he talks half way through. However, today I talked to my coworker and we discussed about machine code and I started to re-watch this vid and I started to understand most of this video. Fabulous! Thank you so much!

[NOTMuzzaFuzza]

If anyone wants to dig deeper into what Gary explained beautifully in this video, I would recommend to learn about the hardware and software of the Intel 8080 or 8085 microprocessor.
It is basic enough for you to grasp the concept of mnemonics to machine code and its hardware is very simple and streamlined.

[oneminutefixed]

another awesome video, loving these series

[MrInk]

Very nice video! Looking forward to more like these!

[davidpolberaff]

Assembly language is extremely underrated I’ve written a lot of it and I can say it was a lot more fun to learn assembly than any other language I’ve used

[sishanmaharjan]

great video :)
Explains quiet well about the general concept over the types of the machine level language.

[xceeder]

another very informative video from Gary, I'll look forward to your next video....

[danielcu]

Great explanation! I have only a little bit of insight into programming languages, but this video made the concepts of assembly language and machine code crystal clear. Love your videos Gary, keep being so informative!

[Dr.physioAli]

I am literally fascinated by the programmings and its complexity complexity

[statikverse]

My current project is writing a simple VM to perform arithmetic. This helped me grasp a lot. Thanks