manhobby wrote:
What is the probable quantity of programmers that currently are coding in machine code?
First, as StudlyCaps stated, aside from enthusiasts, I expect no work to be done directly in machine code. Not on the professional level. Programming in machine code, which I have never done myself, involves writing number sequences, in some cases bit-packed binary sequences, which is neither productive, nor artistic in itself. You can check out this
documentary around the 22 minute mark. They were apparently programming in machine code in 1962, but at this point, they were still figuring out what to do with computers anyway. Today, there are legitimate reasons to understand machine code or have some knowledge of it, but there is a difference between understanding and using directly to create software. Those reasons fall in two categories. First, generating or manipulating programmatically code requires some understanding of machine code. You have to do that when linking, compiling, generating code at run-time in performance sensitive software, hot patching, debugging, tracing, etc. The second principle reason for being vaguely familiar with machine code is code alignment and branching through address arithmetic in assembler programming. Neither of those require hard knowledge, only sketchy knowledge, awareness of the pertinent documentation, and overall understanding.
Quote:
For example, only 1 programmer is currently coding in machine code?
2? 5?
This part of the question is concerning. It is almost inconceivable that you are asking this seriously. At some point I genuinely speculated that someone might be using this forum as a Turing test for their AI. Your question is so unorthodox.