Comment by sd9
10 hours ago
Lovely story, thanks for sharing.
I wonder how many assembly programmers got over it and retrained, versus moved on to do something totally different.
I find the agentic way of working simultaneously more exhausting and less stimulating. I don’t know if that’s something I’m going to get over, or whether this is the end of the line for me.
I wasn't there at the time, but I believe that most assembly programmers learned higher-level languages.
My mother actually started programming in octal. I don't remember her exact words, but she said something to the effect that her life got so much better when she got an assembler. I suspect that going from assembly to compilers was much the same - you no longer had to worry about register allocations and building stack frames.
It was a trade-off for a very long time (late 1960s to late 1990s IMO): the output of the early compilers was much less efficient than hand writing assembly language but it enabled less skilled programmers to produce working programs. Compilers pulled ahead when eventually processor ISAs evolved to optimize executing compiler generated code (e.g. the CISC -> RISC transition) and optimizing compilers became practical because of more powerful hardware. It definitely was not an overnight transformation.