I think it's entirely appropriate that the article just scratches the surface; as you say, going into all the crazy details just makes the topic scary to a newcomer.
In college I met a guy that had co-authored Marathon, the first big hit for Bungie Studios. (This was Ryan Martell, not Jason Jones.) Ryan taught me how my C code compiled to assembly, and we were using 68K Macs back in that day, so it was pretty straightforward to understand once you had somebody to show you the basics.
Oh man, that was a revelation. Stepping through compiled code made concepts like pointers, stack/heap, registers, etc. just as clear as day. Those handful of hours with Ryan did more for my understanding of computing than the whole rest of my college courses. (Well, excepting my operating systems class, that one was good.)
Funny enough, my first job was working on an embedded operating system that didn't have source-level debugging, I had to debug in 68K assembly. So I'll just shout this out to the ether: thanks again, Ryan.
In college I met a guy that had co-authored Marathon, the first big hit for Bungie Studios. (This was Ryan Martell, not Jason Jones.) Ryan taught me how my C code compiled to assembly, and we were using 68K Macs back in that day, so it was pretty straightforward to understand once you had somebody to show you the basics.
Oh man, that was a revelation. Stepping through compiled code made concepts like pointers, stack/heap, registers, etc. just as clear as day. Those handful of hours with Ryan did more for my understanding of computing than the whole rest of my college courses. (Well, excepting my operating systems class, that one was good.)
Funny enough, my first job was working on an embedded operating system that didn't have source-level debugging, I had to debug in 68K assembly. So I'll just shout this out to the ether: thanks again, Ryan.