[Kye]

I think it's more "old man yells at cloud" than you realize. Do you think people who manually input programs by moving wires around lamented bytecodes and assemblers? I would guess they did. The better C compilers get, the less there is to do in low-level code, and the less there is to innovate on that will be missed by no one knowing more than what's left. They can already compile themselves.

This lament draws a straight line back to concerns over books hurting memory and a culture of oral and visual teaching and storytelling. Books probably did have that effect, but the gain was worth it. There would have been no books to hold on to the progress of the ancients through the various rough patches Europe went through without books. "How much progress was lost because it wasn't written down?" and "how much progress was lost because the tools were inaccessible to the person with the right idea?" are the same question.

Assembly is fairly easy to learn (going by my few attempts) in the same way picking up the syntax for most languages is easy, but doing anything non-trivial is at least as involved as any other way of communicating with thinking sand.