Counterpoint: I picked it up in high school and I was Not That Bright(tm).
Certainly, some complex instruction-set extensions or sprawling SIMD mnemonics are more challenging that what I was reading in the 90s, but the boogie-man status of assembly is greatly overstated.
The final thesis, that we can-and-should let LLMs micro-optimize assembly into non-statically-verifiable gibberish to save an instruction stacks misunderstandings on top of misunderstandings. Just vapid gold-rush cheer-leading from Wired.
I am currently only using the core ISA (no compressed instructions, not even the pseudo instructions), and I use a C preprocessor to avoid to get my code locked on the preprocessor of one assembler.
I started to code assembly when I was a teenager as it is not hard: only uncomfortable. Nowdays, with what seems a real global, no IP locks, ISA, RISC-V, it is very reasonable to write directly assembly, as (real and sane) standard assembly is extremely efficient at fighting planned obsolecence.
helsinkiandrew•1h ago