An age ago, I wrote a fast interrupt handler in assembler that was, under its somewhat severe operating constraints, "elegant and functional." That was about a

An age ago, I wrote a fast interrupt handler in assembler that was, under its somewhat severe operating constraints, "elegant and functional." That was about a page of code, commented in two-column format, a sort of side-by-side tutorial. There were more lines of comments than lines of code. Even with that, the junior engineers (familiar with assembly!) were completely flummoxed by it. Domain knowledge encoded in assembly rapidly becomes highly obfuscated, even when written in a literate programming style. I simply cannot imagine calling large-scale enterprise business logic written in assembly "elegant and functional" for any reason. Even the best written, best documented assembly obfuscates so much meaning .