[davidhbolton]

Even back in the 1980s, author Lance Leventhal who wrote some great programming books on assembly always warned that productivity wise you write the same number of lines of code whether its 6502 or C.

As that 6502 example in the article shows, you don't great great productivity with assembly. And even macros don't improve on it that much.

[cmrdporcupine]

One writes 6502 assembly by hand because there is really no alternative on that ISA. It does not make a good target for a C compiler, there are very few of them to begin with, and hand written 6502 (or 65816) is going to be better than anything produced by any compiler for it at this point in time.