“If you can vertically center a div, you can probably learn assembly”. Casey Muratori, @cmuratori, programmer and performance nerd, on why it’s essential for optimization: “People often ask: assembly language, what would I ever need that for? There's a very good reason for it: everything else that you might use doesn't tell you anything about what the CPU is actually receiving. If I look at a Java program, if I look at a C program, if I look at Haskell, OCaml, Rust, all I'm seeing is input to a compiler. I have no idea what the CPU is actually going to be asked to do. It's not that hard to be able to learn to read assembly language so that you can see very quickly, is the CPU being asked to do the things that I think it should be asked to do. For the vast majority of tasks you might do in optimization, writing it, no. Reading it, essential. In assembly language, maybe there's 20 or 30 instructions you might have to learn total, because most things in legacy assembly, like x64, are hardly ever output by the compiler. So you only need to learn a very small subset that you're going to be seeing in 90% of cases.”