I have a confession to make: I don’t know how to use Awk. Or at least I didn’t know how to use it before I started writing this article. I would hear people mention Awk and how often they used it, and I was pretty certain I was missing out on some minor superpower.
Source: Understanding AWK, an article by Gordon Bell.
On occasion, you need to take something apart and put it back together to fully understand it. I’m sure many of the people reading this article will have been one of those kids. Kids who took a screwdriver to something, just to see whats inside it. It’s a thrill, but its a whole different skill to put it back together.
The working machine on the outside obscures a network of patterns, patches, and workarounds in its internals. Programmers are used to working on the guts of a system and manipulating the ugly-inner workings to get it to follow some simple instructions.
This experiment was no different. I wanted to see if I could write a CPython Extension in 100% assembly.
Source: Writing Python Extensions in Assembly, an article by Anthony Shaw.