Originally published to Cohost with no title, as a response to an ask “assembly or bash?” from Alice
a question with multiple interpretations! i’m going to have fun with this :3
Which Would I Rather Use?
It depends, obviously. I’d use assembly for file operations and bash for SIMD, obviously. Wait no I g-
Which Would I Rather Write?
Both can be a pain, and for similar reasons: some old white dudes made some technical decisions forever ago and those decisions may have been OK then but now we’re stuck with them for backcompat purposes and honestly we should probably have moved on by now but oh well backcompat too stronk.
For me, though, the pain of assembly makes me feel like a wizard trying to find the right runes but a little demon pokes my brain with a pitchfork every time I get one wrong, while the pain of bash makes me feel like I’m talking to a senile grandpa who keeps extoling “back in my day” while changing his story every half hour but I can’t really leave since I’m his assigned nurse this shift. So the answer to this one is assembly.
Which Sounds Cooler As A Magic Spell?
bash. assembly maybe constructs you a wooden table, but bash lets you create dents in anything proportional to the mana input, and some mages found that could include your opponent’s heart, leading to a low-mana instakill spell that revolutionized the magical meta once that was discovered.
Closing Thoughts
it seems bash and assembly are tied here. oh well guess the question couldn’t be answered after all sorry