Yes and no. If you expressed interest in learning to program and were handed a book on x86 assembly language, most people would call that a waste of time. Even if you succeed at learning x86 as your first language, the knowledge will not be especially useful when employers are looking for fluency in modern C++ or Rust or whatever. It never hurts to have a solid grasp of the low-level fundamentals, of course, but it's not the name of the game. Not anymore.
The way I think of it is, all current programming languages are now assembly languages. Coding will not go away -- not by any means -- but the job will be utterly unrecognizable in ten to fifteen years.
And it's about fucking time.
I just picked up a new 13900k / RTX4090 box the other day at the local white-box builder. I was telling my partner how cool it was that it could do almost a trillion calculations per second on the CPU, and maybe 40x that on the graphics card. "How does that compare to the big mainframes from the late 60s?" she asked. "About ten million times faster. But I still program the same way those guys did, using almost the same language and tools. How weird is that?"
The way I think of it is, all current programming languages are now assembly languages. Coding will not go away -- not by any means -- but the job will be utterly unrecognizable in ten to fifteen years.
And it's about fucking time.
I just picked up a new 13900k / RTX4090 box the other day at the local white-box builder. I was telling my partner how cool it was that it could do almost a trillion calculations per second on the CPU, and maybe 40x that on the graphics card. "How does that compare to the big mainframes from the late 60s?" she asked. "About ten million times faster. But I still program the same way those guys did, using almost the same language and tools. How weird is that?"