Especially 6502 assembly, because all the opcodes have three letters, so they form a sleek column of text that slides smoothly by without friction from jagged bumpy edges. All other assembly languages look rough and ragged to me!

CPU, registers, interrupts, RAM, I/O... It’s just you and the machine baby.

I started programming with assembly, and evem though today I rarely use it, any excuse I can find, I’ll dig into in.

No question, modern languages are more efficient, but knowing exactly what instructions are being run and how they interact with the hardware (a physical object), is so much more aesthetically pleasing.

In the embedded world there is still enough of it. Today we had to free up 1200 bytes because our software did no longer run after adding 2 new features; not enough free memory. With higher level languages we would already have no chance with the previous features on the hardware, with asm we managed to optimize enough to free up the needed memory. It is amazing you always seem to be able to push it further. All that was a must in the 70-80s homecomputers as they were not (easily, without soldering generally) expandable, so you had to make it work on what was there. I got into my current work because I like that kind of optimizing and puzzling from when I did it in the 80s as a kid.

I used to work in the embedded world about 10 years ago. There was definitely plenty of byte-level optimization then, but reading the tea leaves pointed to a very different direction (eg, embedded java, embedded SQL).

Makes me happy to hear folks are still hacking bits in 2018.