From a modern perspective it's fun to think about the layers of sometimes-trivial complexity that we fly over with modern development tools, but when I wrote Apple Writer in 1978, I first had to write an assembler, and to do that, I first had to enter seemingly endless amounts of object code to get to the tipping point where I could enter comparatively efficient 6502 assembly-language mnemonics and actually get something accomplished.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Writer