Nostalgia for Assembly Programming

Where has assembly programming gone to? I remember growing up in the '80s and the B. Dalton bookstores (remember those?) being shelved full of assembly language books for the Commodore 64 personal computer. Nowadays, it seems that everything is too complicated for all but the most brilliant minds to dabble in assembly code. And as an outdated programming language, most don't even bother to familiarize themselves with it these days, given that nothing much runs off assembly anymore.

Then again, technology has so improved that the principal benefit of assembly language, its speed, may be irrelevant, while the inherent incomprehensibility of the language (and you think C++ is hard) remains a liability.

Computer languages are fascinating. And despite the obscure "look" of assembly, I remain intrigued by it. Assembly languages were first developed as second-generation languages that freed programmers from tedium such as remembering numeric codes and calculating addresses. This lead to an increase in programming productivity, and I surmise that it is this very reason that assembly has been dropped along with the rest of the '80s. Advanced hardware has made high-level languages less cost-intensive in terms of computational cycles, allowing instruction that resembles a modicum of English. Assembly languages have simply become obsolete under newer high-level programming languages.

Ah, yes, the '80s. When even amateur programmers could still alter the sizes of the paddles in classic Pong. When a programmer could still do it all himself and become a millionaire overnight with an instant runaway hit, such as David Crane of Pitfall! fame. This title sold over four million copies at a time when home video game consoles were not as common as today, taking only ten minutes to conceive and ten thousand hours (a little over a year) to program. It was coded entirely in assembly, of course, as no high-level languages existed for consoles back then. This then the game has spawned several sequels, including Pitfall: The Lost Expedition for the last generation of consoles released in 2004, and again rereleased for the Nintendo Wii in 2008.

It was a time that will never be again, when mere hobbyists and professional programmers were not too different. Professionals were really only those hobbyists who were skilled enough to be paid for their work. Hobbyist programmers have not gone extinct though. In fact, as of recently, amateur programming has experienced a renaissance of sorts, especially in the field of mobile technology. Most smartphones - the iphone for example - run applications, which are now open sourced, meaning that anyone with the skills to program a decent app can do so and make it available for download to the general public. This system has opened up an entire market of obscure or specific applications for all different purposes.