"A friend of my grandmother is a Computer Scientist from MIT..."

How old is your grandmother's friend?

My grandmother worked as a bookkeeper, and in the 1960's operated an IBM computer (her employer was not IBM, it was Layne Bowler, an international maker of water pumps). My grandmother loaded punch-cards into the computers to run reports.

It's likely that the code on these punch-cards was written in Assembly language. That's the era that Assembly language belongs to, so that's why I ask how old your grandmother's friend is. It could be they are basing their opinion on an outdated era.

Some people still do use Assembly language, but only for very low-level code on embedded systems or as output of compilers. If you want a career writing high-performance microcode for computer hardware, like on the chips of network adapters, you should learn Assembly. If you write compiler optimizers, you probably will use Assembly. Writing Assembly is hard to write, harder to maintain, and very time-consuming for both. It also requires a lot of programming skill. And it can't work on another type of computer architecture.

But Assembly gives you an opportunity to write code that is compact, efficient, and optimized for the project you're implementing. You can do amazing things in just a few Kilobytes of Assembly code. But today storage is cheap, processing power is cheap. The level of efficiency you can gain by using Assembly is not justified by the extra work, time, and skill it requires.

It's true that languages rise and fall in popularity. The name of the game in programming is productivity, and new languages are invented from time to time, which give an advantage in productivity, at least for certain types of work.

The vast majority of programmers today use a higher level language, because they need to be more productive. High-level languages are either compiled to machine code (e.g. C or C++) or compiled to an architecture-independent bytecode and run in a virtual machine (e.g. Java) or interpreted (e.g. Javascript, PHP, Ruby, Python, Perl, shell, etc.).

You've received many other answers that say the same thing, but I'll add my voice to those who say it's absolutely false that you should learn Assembly because it's "better than Python." This is a foolish, myopic, outdated thing to say. We expect more wisdom from any MIT computer scientist, and trust that they wouldn't be foolish. That's why many people are answering that your grandmother's friend must be pulling your leg.

Source: https://www.quora.com/Is-Python-a-dying-language


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