I'm going to need actual statistics before I'll believe that assembly programmers, hardware hackers, et cetera are any rarer than they once were. My informal o

I'm going to need actual statistics before I'll believe that assembly programmers, hardware hackers, et cetera are any rarer than they once were. My informal observation is that there's more hardware around than ever. Who designed and built these dozens and dozens of Android phones and tablets? Where are all these tiny helicopters and balancing scooters and taco-delivering drones coming from? Yes, the average programmer today knows a lot less about assembly language than the average programmer in 1980. But there were a lot fewer programmers and a lot fewer computers in 1980, and to do anything beyond BASIC on a microcomputer required assembly. Since then the number of programmers has exploded, and it has not done so evenly. I'm sure that today there's a lot more Visual Basic-only programmers in the world than assembly programmers, but that doesn't mean that the population of assembly programmers has shrunk; it just hasn't grown as quickly. I also suspect that, should it become sufficiently important to double the number of trained assembly hackers, we have the means to do so: Raise the bid high enough and, sure, I'll absolutely retrain in an assembly language newer than 6502 and Motorola 68000. ;) (Though, alas, I'm told that however clever I become at optimizing my assembly, the compiler is probably cleverer still, so I guess I should dream of embedded C instead of assembly.)