But it was ever thus. The knowledge of writing assembly language has largely been lost. The vast majority of working programmers today could not write a whole p

But it was ever thus. The knowledge of writing assembly language has largely been lost. The vast majority of working programmers today could not write a whole program in assembly, without looking up nearly everything. In the early years, when compilers were quite bad, it was common for people to write whole programs in assembly even when they could have written C because their output was higher quality. And there were in fact die-hards who just refused to use a compiler in principle, even long after that became irrational. Rollercoaster Tycoon was totally written in assembly, not a single line of C or C++ anywhere. In the mid 90s! But now only a small number of people need to know it and learn it. For everyone else we let the "artificial intelligence" of the compiler work it out. And whereas it was once worse than humans at writing assembly, these days it's usually better. Does anyone care? No. It wasn't important.