Absolutely valid criticism. I'd love to hear more about what you did between seeing the link here and navigating to that example program. I've been trying to build a path to gradually take programmers to an understanding of (this particular unconventional style of) assembly programming. For example, I'm curious how much of the Readme you read, and if you happened to notice that the Readme has an orientation on the x86 processor.
I read the first section of the readme without really understanding much but also not expecting to as I don't know x86 assembly. Then I decided to at least give the examples a superficial look as I'd noticed the word newcomers in the readme. But I couldn't see the number `42` in a program meant to print `42`, so that's where I gave up.
Is this meant to be a tutorial for assembly noobs?
For comparison I think your readme for Wart[0] is more welcoming: Briefly explaining what it is and how to run it, and then straight onto a simple example that people can actually try out.
That's a good point. I have similar instructions here, but they're in the second section, 3 screens down..
The audience is assembly-curious programmers, but you aren't expected to know any assembly. I just want to try to hook anyone interested in the goal. If you're interested in a stack you can understand from the ground up, I'm willing to try to explain things to you.
I might just be outside the target audience, for now. I don't even know any C. Realistically, I think it would have to be spoon-fed to me in some Bret Victor-esque crocodiles and eggs[0] manner for me to not lose focus.
I went through this absolutely fantastic SQL tutorial this week. Perhaps you might find their list of pedagogical principles[1] useful?
I think one thing that potentially could tempt me into low-level code would be making cool tunes[2][3].
I got to try out the point of compiling and trying out your programs now. `ex8`, `ex9` and `ex10` all segfault here.
Some time ago I was at a wedding, and I was terribly bored, until I found out that the guy to my left was writing washing machine software in assembly. In a way it seems awfully primitive, e.g. your `ex11.subx` is 350 lines long and prints out `.......` but I guess in certain systems it's the only option, and what's underneath it all in any system.
Those examples expect arguments at the commandline, and I chose not to perform error checking for an example :) The focus lay elsewhere for them. See the comment at the top for each.
ex11.subx is running a test for each of those dots :)
