[commandlinefan]

I learned to program on a 6502 when I was younger - it's a little depressing that computers went and got so fast that there's no real justification for doing this sort of thing any more in almost any domain (except, I guess, if you manage to land a position developing embedded I2C drivers).

[jhayward]

Join the ultra-low-power crowd! There are lots of fun things to make while trying to squeeze it in a couple of KB and a few kHz.

[chrischen]

Yes but there are new primitive domains to master, like driving a motor with an arduino, or programming FPGAs.

[djmips]

I beg to differ; shader / GPU programming has been a haven for justification of programming 'that sort of thing'. Particularly on home consoles where the hardware doesn't change year on year but the need to improve is still prevalent.

[fzort]

You still need to know a bit of assembly to take advantage of SIMD (even when using compiler intrinsics). See for instance https://github.com/lemire/simdjson