No arguing that. It still doesn't mean that writing stuff in assembly is better than leaving it higher level. Nowadays we have new approaches that didn't exist

No arguing that. It still doesn't mean that writing stuff in assembly is better than leaving it higher level. Nowadays we have new approaches that didn't exist back then. Look up any JavaScript optimization techniques to see stuff that's simply not possible to do once your code is moved down to assembly because it loses semantics. Or look at fusion and type erasure in Haskell. In my original comment, I wasn't arguing about the state of things 30 years ago.