[TriEmbed] what's more basic than assembly language?

[Bill Trautman]

The subject caught my mind.   So in some systems there is a layer between the hardware and the instructions that are part of the architecture.   An example would be the microcode that creates the Z 
architecture on IBM Mainframes (and a lot of the prior revisions of the architecture).  basically the architecture is micro-coded in the native architecture to create the defined architecture that 
folks expect.

Bill

On 12/20/2025 12:33 PM, Pete Soper via TriEmbed wrote:
> The blog below caught my attention on Hacker News and got me thinking about bottom up understanding of computing. This is about projects relating to some kind of demo/contest event for FPGA's (field 
> programmable gate arrays), but the author goes into some detail about how entertaining "toys" like a VGA graphics generator can be made. That led to thinking about whether learning to work with 
> FPGAs would help somebody to understand how computers "really work". But a little more thought made me ask myself whether a modern programmer even needs to know about, let alone understand machine 
> language. Not clear that this is relevant. (but I'd love it if at least one CS course would show how decompiling a single C++ statement leveraging overloading, polymorphism, grotesque layers of 
> header references, etc can result in an avalanche of machine code)
> Anyway, I haven't even finished this and I'm talked out of the supposition. :-)
> But perhaps some of you might be interested in playing with FPGAs, as the hobby level hardware is very cheap and tools and examples are plentiful.
>
> https://www.a1k0n.net/2025/12/19/tiny-tapeout-demo.html
>
> Pete
>
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