About programing, a general question

[Marko Vojinovic]

On Wednesday 22 December 2010 17:07:46 David Liguori wrote:
> I'm surprised no one has suggested this so far as I've read so I will,
> but if one is really interested in learning about how the hardware works
> the most obvious place to start is "assembly" or "machine" language.

Well, it actually was suggested before:

  http://www.spinics.net/linux/fedora/fedora-users/msg387760.html

There were also others that mentioned assembly afterwards, but I cannot bother 
now to dig out all those posts... :-)

But as I said in that previous post, you don't want to *start* learning 
programming with assembly, but rather to *end* it with assembly.

It gives you a hardware-level perspective on what happens inside a computer, 
and that is *not* a perspective any beginner should start with. If I 
understood correctly what OP wants, assembly is the ultimate answer to his 
wish to understand how programs actually run inside a computer. But in order 
to properly grasp the idea, he needs quite some experience in higher-level 
languages.

It's a long road of abstraction from "point&click" GUI to a sequence of 
assembly instructions that are actually being executed. As the OP has no 
experience in higher levels of programming, it would be hard for him to have a 
reasonable overview of that whole road just by looking at assembly. I would 
rather prefer the top-down approach than the bottom-up approach in this case.

So the OP should start with, say, python, than advance to C, and then he may 
take a look at assembly. The OO and functional languages can be dealt with 
afterwards if he wishes to know about them.

> You don't actually write machine code but rather, "nenomics" that
> correspond to it.

It's spelled "mnemonics".

Best, :-)
Marko