[gizmo686]

The 1950s were a different time. Nowadays computing power is almost too cheap to meter. I do not think anyone at almost any software company knows how to answer the question "how much money are we spending on running our compilers". In most cases, I suspect the cost of running the compiler dominated by the salary of the programmer as he types "make" and waits for the compilation to finish.

We live in a world where every employee has a previously unimaginable amount of processing power dedicated for their personal use that spends almost all of its time idling. That results in a far different calculus than the world where processing power is a scarce resource.

[greenyoda]

If an assembler or compiler could save you from having to run dozens of extra batch jobs to fix a bug in your hard-to-understand machine language code, it might have allowed more time on an expensive machine to be used for productive purposes.

[thatoneuser]

Yet the most prevalent tests these days for SE are based around the old problems. Then again these tests are less about how good of an engineer you are and more of how submissive you are.