Maybe it's the new Assembly. With what little hacking and programming I am willing to put effort into, I will always prefer to work at the direct hardware acces

Maybe it's the new Assembly. With what little hacking and programming I am willing to put effort into, I will always prefer to work at the direct hardware access level rather than the massive abstraction that is required to run C & the relevant interpreters. Then again, I prefer working on 6xxx architecture (6502,6507,6809,etc) and cap out around 286 IBM compatible with MS-DOS for any real tasks.