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Add to SafariWhen comparing Assembly vs Pony, the Slant community recommends Pony for most people. In the question“What are the best (productivity-enhancing, well-designed, and concise, rather than just popular or time-tested) programming languages?” Pony is ranked 22nd while Assembly is ranked 61st. The most important reason people chose Pony is:
The unique type system allows the compiler to automatically schedule actors on threads, giving you reliable concurrency for free.
Question Ranking
Pros
Pro Low Level - it's how the computer works
One of the best ways to learn how a computer actually works is to work your way up from lower level abstractions. Assembly, being only a level above machine code, is low enough level to make it clear how the computer is actually performing a computation, including code flow and loops, but high enough level to not be excessively tedious for the type of small projects that a student would do at the beginning of their first programming class. Use of an assembler with macros can stretch this even a bit further.
Pro Naturally creates fast and small programs
Because of its natural syntax and low-level nature, assembly language programs are typically really small and fast.
Unlike other programming languages, in assembly language it is really hard to create a slow and over-bloated program.
Pro You must look into it if you really want to understand what computers do
There is no other way to understand a processor, so dig in.
Pro Useful for embedded systems
A curriculum that involves an embedded component, such as an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, can encourage students by allowing them to immediately connect their work with 'real systems'. Assembly is the ideal language for getting started with and understanding these devices, and since Assembly can be called from C, the code will still be useful if students move on to C later in the program.
Pro Uniform syntax
Assembly language syntax is relatively uniform, and so there's less room for a student to get confused by obscure characters, or miss some meaning implied by structure, such as with scoping rules, or call-by-name/value/reference semantics. While there may be a lot of mnemonics to look up, most work involves only a very small subset of them.
Pro Concurrency model based on actors
The unique type system allows the compiler to automatically schedule actors on threads, giving you reliable concurrency for free.
Pro Reliable
Because of its capabilities secure type system, provided you don't use the C FFI, references will never be stale, race conditions are effectively impossible, deadlocks don't happen because locks and mutexes are never needed, and processes never crash because all exceptions must be handled. (Barring compiler bugs or external memory corruption, of course.) Pony programs can still lock up due to infinite loops, like any Turing-complete language.
Pro High performance
Compiles to native code, and features an intelligent garbage collector that takes advantage of the actor architecture to get essentially free garbage collection.
Pro Trivially simple C FFI
Calling low-level C functions is as simple as use "lib:clibrary" and @c_function_name[return_type](parameter:type). Linking C to Pony libraries is just as easy, as the Pony compiler will generate appropriate header files.
Cons
Con Difficult learning curve
Starting off as a beginner with assembly language could prove very daunting. I suggest learning a high level language first (e.g. C) to get a good grasp of programming - especially dealing with bits, bytes, numbers, accessing memory with pointers (which is why I suggest C).
Then once that person is comfortable writing C (or whatever high level language) programs, they would find moving to assembler a little less of a "What the hell?!!!" experience.
Con Rarely a requirement or used in professional employment
(except for experts, which will outperform you in assembly language and execution speed on any day of the week, simply because they have full control of the processor.)
Con Not very portable
The instruction set may change depending on what CPU architecture is being used. Also, there will be some differences in implementations due to different assemblers being used, such as with changes in OS.
Con Language for those sadists that like pain
Not recommended as a first language. However, in small doses to show how higher level code is executed, can be of some value. Is also a language that will take a longer time to learn or finish projects with, so usually not for those who are in a hurry to get anything in particular done.
Con Hyperspecific syntax isn't a good first step to learning other modern languages
Con All exceptions must be caught
The compiler enforces this, so code is littered with trys.
Con Limited documentation
As Pony is such a new language, documentation is relatively light, and tutorials are few and far-between.
Con Few libraries
Con Garbage collector can't run until you yield
A long-running behavior can leak memory because the garbage collector has no chance to run.
Con Limited tooling
There's no IDE. Debuggers are fairly basic. Pony is too young to have much of an ecosystem.
Con Divide by zero is allowed
And instead of some sensible result like NaN or Inf, the answer is zero! Most languages would just raise an exception (and Pony used to do this), but since the compiler enforces the rule that "all exceptions must be caught" the proliferation of trys was determined to be too burdensome on the programmer. This makes the whole design of the exception system questionable.
Con Unstable API
Pony is not ready for production. It has yet to release version 1.0, and there are frequent breaking changes.
Con Difficult learning curve
The type system uses a capabilities-oriented approach to reference semantics, which can be difficult to wrap your head around at first. The lack of more common object-oriented features and the preference for simplicity over familiarity can make it difficult for new users to model their program design.
