will prevent one from quickly iterating over different ideas.
I consider that a good thing. Making implementation harder means you'll be forced to be more thoughtful in design; Asm is so explicit and "low density" that you will naturally want to make every instruction count. You won't be easily tempted to make copies of strings, allocate memory, or do frivolous data movement, because those things all take instructions - instructions that you have to write. Even if you're calling functions, you still have to write the instructions to call them and pass parameters every time. You'll be more careful about not doing work that you don't have to.
Contrast this with high-level languages that make copying data around and allocating huge amounts of memory as easy as '=' and '{}'. They're good for prototyping high-level "does it work" types of things and exploring concepts - the "quickly iterating over different ideas" that you mention - but once you decide what to do, are a lot less controllable with the details because of their high-level nature. And the details, the constants in algorithms, do matter a lot in the real world. Moreover, the difference in constants can be so big that even "proper system-level design" in HLLs can't beat a theoretically less efficient design in Asm, because the constants with the latter are miniscule.
See KolibriOS, MenuetOS, or TempleOS for an idea of what Asm can do.
I consider that a good thing. Making implementation harder means you'll be forced to be more thoughtful in design; Asm is so explicit and "low density" that you will naturally want to make every instruction count. You won't be easily tempted to make copies of strings, allocate memory, or do frivolous data movement, because those things all take instructions - instructions that you have to write. Even if you're calling functions, you still have to write the instructions to call them and pass parameters every time. You'll be more careful about not doing work that you don't have to.
Contrast this with high-level languages that make copying data around and allocating huge amounts of memory as easy as '=' and '{}'. They're good for prototyping high-level "does it work" types of things and exploring concepts - the "quickly iterating over different ideas" that you mention - but once you decide what to do, are a lot less controllable with the details because of their high-level nature. And the details, the constants in algorithms, do matter a lot in the real world. Moreover, the difference in constants can be so big that even "proper system-level design" in HLLs can't beat a theoretically less efficient design in Asm, because the constants with the latter are miniscule.
See KolibriOS, MenuetOS, or TempleOS for an idea of what Asm can do.