Comment by kragen

I'm so tired of this bullshit mystique around assembly: "you saw craftsmanship so obsessive that it bordered on insane. Chris Sawyer, the game’s sole developer, wrote the whole thing in assembly."

There's nothing insane about writing games or other programs in assembly language. It takes longer than writing them in C or JS, sure. Debugging them becomes more difficult. Sometimes you can achieve results that way you can't achieve in higher-level languages. But it's not some kind of superhuman wizardry. Assembly language is actually simpler than the higher-level languages. Virtually all videogames for the Nintendo were written in assembly. People have written entire operating systems in assembly.

It's not "brutal". It just takes longer, that's all. People like to set up hierarchies of languages based on what's more difficult, but I think that's kind of juvenile: teenage boy one-upmanship. Solving puzzles is fun, but anybody can learn to solve them.

Assembly-language programs can be beautiful. So can programs in any language. Usually they aren't.