Re: C# programmer wants to learn assembly?? plz help

rhyde@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
//\\\\o//\\\\annabee wrote:

Of course, one must take such counts with a grain of salt. 'Bots and
other web automata tend to inflate these numbers greatly. HLA, for
example, has been consistently getting 5,000-10,000 downloads a month
for the past couple of years. I estimate, in reality, that there are
probably 100-200 actual downloads that people are using each month.

Why do you need to estimate?


Because the numbers I read around here, and the numbers I see for HLA
downloads, are completely bogus.


My webspace provider gives me automatic
statitics containing infoes as spesific as how many unique downloads,
exactly the number of downloads,

[to Wannabee]
Okay. So... how's the "market" for the all-asm apps that RosAsm's famous for? I think you and I would agree that a nice "tight" asm-written app is "better" than what HLL's typically produce (the fault of the programmer, not the language, IMO). Any evidence that the "users" give a ***?

....
That's wonderful.
Apparantly, people providing assemblers for download don't use your
ISP. Because they're all claiming to get (within an order of magnitude)
all the same download rates. If all of these downloads were legitimate,
even if we allow for the fact that the same person downloads *all* the
assemblers out there, the number of posts in a newsgroup like this one
would be increasing radically with each new month. Even if only 1% of
the (claimed) people who downloaded these products wound up posting a
message here, we'd be seeing something like 100 new posters every
month. Also, I know from personal support issues (email, book
purchases, posts to the AoA/HLA mailing list, etc.) that HLA is not
getting 10,000 new users each month. Obviously, I cannot speak for the
other assemblers on this matter, but given that they are claiming
similar download numbers, I *really* suspect that we're all seeing the
same automata accessing the files.

Do the automata download the same number of Linux binaries of HLA as Windows binaries? On SF they don't. Interesting to look at the stats... Take the "contributions" package...

file date available downloads
---- -------------- ---------
Jim Carlock's .chm manual 9/29/06 3294
Nasm64developer's FP bugfix3 12/27/05 3337
Nasm64developer's FP bugfix2 12/10/05 383
Nasm64developer's flow-control macros 7/25/05 2423
initial draft of macho output 6/24/05 1156
Spanish docs - no accents 1/20/04 4084
Spanish docs - with accents 11/02/03 2497
Nasm64developer's FP bugfix 7/03/03 3225
extended struc macros 6/07/03 3728

Hmmm... there's more, but SF won't let me at 'em... In particular, there is/was a "multiboot" example that's been downloaded quite a lot (that many people writing OSen??? 'bots really like it???). Similarly, Windows binaries are downloaded (counted, anyway) more than Linux (which *are* declining... reflecting greater availability in distros??? or fewer users???). Nasm16 is *finally* falling off. I don't have a theory that accounts for 'bots producing these numbers. Do you?

I agree that the numbers are not "meaningful". I don't see evidence that "Fasm is killing Nasm", and if it is, I suspect it's the 64-bit support, not the fact that Nasm's written in C. I'm not so sure that if there were more users, we'd see more posts to newsgroups "like this one" (if any), but you'd think we'd hear from them *somewhere*! Betov's correct that Nasm users (if any) don't have much to say!

Best,
Frank
.

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