TL;DR: If You’re Going to Cheat, At Least Learn Something from It.

After a long career as a CS professor—often teaching assembly language—I’ve seen it all.

My thinking on cheating has evolved to see value in higher effort cheating. The value is this: some people put effort into cheating using it as a learning tool that buys them time to improve, learn and flourish. If this is you, good on you. You are putting in the work necessary to join our field as a productive member. Sure, you're taking an unorthodox route, but you are making an effort to learn.

Too often, I see low-effort cheaters—including in this subreddit. “Do my homework for me! Here’s a vague description of my assignment because I’m too lazy to even explain it properly!”

As a former CS professor, I’ll be blunt: if this is you, then you’re not just wasting your time—you’re a danger to the profession - hell, you're a danger to humanity!

Software runs the world—and it can also destroy it. Writing software is one of the most dangerous and impactful things humans do.

If you can’t even put in the effort to cheat in a way that helps you learn, then you don’t belong in this profession.

If you’re lost and genuinely want to improve, here’s one method for productive cheating:

Copy and paste your full project specification into a tool like GPT-4 or GPT-3.5. Provide as much detail as possible and ask it to generate well-explained, well-commented code.

Take the results, study them, learn from them, and test them thoroughly. GPT’s comments and explanations are often helpful, even if the generated code is buggy or incomplete. By reading, digesting, and fixing the code, you can rapidly improve your skills and understanding.

Remember: software can kill. If you can’t commit to becoming a responsible coder, this field isn’t for you.

The Register's Obituary For Kathleen Booth

I never thought about who "invented" asm; but here is (was) that person!

I wrote a short book (in Japanese) called "GBA de manabu teireiya" (Learning Low-Level Programming with the Game Boy Advance). It's aimed at people who can already program a bit but have never touched the hardware/OS layer.

Rather than relying on an OS, it does bare-metal programming: you talk to the hardware (like the screen) directly. It walks through everything needed to reach "Hello, world!" on the GBA -- compiling, assembling, linking, and generating the executable -- starting from pure ARM assembly and building up to mixing assembly with C. No real GBA needed; a Docker environment plus an emulator is enough to follow along.

Right now it only exists in Japanese, so I'm trying to gauge interest: would an English version be useful to this community? Would any of you be interested in a resource like this, and what would you most want it to cover? Any feedback on demand or scope would help me decide whether to translate it.

Info/source code page (Japanese): https://nikatech.nikachu.net/item/gba_lowlevel

Thats a burning question of mine I have had for a while, who decided to start with ABSTRACTION before REAL INFO! It baffles me how people can even code, yet not understand the thing executing it, and thats from me, a person who started my programming journey in Commodore BASIC Version 2 on the C64, but quickly learned assembly after understanding BASIC to a simple degree, its just schools shouldn't spend so much time on useless things like "garbage collection", like what, I cant manage my own memory anymore!? why?

***End of (maybe stupid) rant***

Hopefully someone can shed some light on this, its horrible! schools are expecting people to code, but not understand the thing executing students work!?