"Back in the day", pre-RISC, with fancy macro assemblers (like Turbo Assembler), programming in assembly was actually not that bad. C is obviously better, but

"Back in the day", pre-RISC, with fancy macro assemblers (like Turbo Assembler), programming in assembly was actually not that bad. C is obviously better, but not actually as much better as people seem to think. Nowadays life would be a lot worse in assembler, because CPUs are designed to be programmed mostly by compilers, not humans. (Also, the ways in which C is better than assembly roughly correspond to the ways in which our query language would be better than SQL. Like, say, variable scoping.)