[CaesarA]

I still don't understand how people were able to write software in the days when assembly was the only option for speedy execution.

[throw-qqqqq]

You can define macros over the assembly to gain a high level language sort of similar to an untyped dialect of C.

For me it would be sort of like writing programs in C versus higher level languages: much more tedious, will take longer and require better planning/upfront design, but doable.

With practice you learn some tricks that can seem clever to anyone not writing a lot of asm. It’s “just” a very low level language IMO.

[6SixTy]

Keeping things pretty simple in project scope and hardware helps quite a lot