C or LabVIEW: CompactRIO

[Greg McKaskle]

Originally Posted by EricVanWyk

I see learning lower level languages (such as assembly) as the CompE equivalent of taking a Design for Manufacture course.

I almost totally agree. But I think that a computer architecture course and an algorithms course are soooo much better than learning assembly.

Algorithms, to choose the simplest code with the simplest access patterns.

Architecture, because even at the assembly level, execution performance is hard to predict without considering cache lines, cache sizes, interrupt latencies, etc. Ideally, the architecture course uses an assembly language to illustrate some of the concepts.

And of course both of these will get you only so far, so familiarity with profiling techniques, profiling tools, and lots of experimentation are necessary too. The architectures just keep getting more comlex.

Greg McKaskle