NASM has a logical and sane syntax that is both readable and maps directly to the generated instructions, in other words it is designed to be written by hand, n

NASM has a logical and sane syntax that is both readable and maps directly to the generated instructions, in other words it is designed to be written by hand, not as an convenient intermediate format for the compiler to generate. Contrast that to typical AT&T-syntax x86 assembly with bunch of meaningless punctuation and complex addressing modes represented by bunch of comma separated numbers. And with MASM that needs bunch of boilerplate and noise words, because the syntax is motivated by what was required to produce real-mode 16b object files.