[sshine]

I've heard from people older than me that this is how people felt about compilers.

https://vivekhaldar.com/articles/when-compilers-were-the--ai...

He provides some sources (7) at the bottom of the article.

To pick one, the following has a video interview with one of the founders of Fortran:

https://www.ibm.com/history/fortran#:~:text=Fortran%20was%20...

So we're not making up stuff, this perspective was ubiquitous among assembly programmers of the 1950s. In 1958 (as the first article I link to mentions), half of programs were written in Fortran. Which means half of people still thought writing assembly by hand was the way to go.

I've personally written assembly by hand for money on an obscure architecture, and I've also written a non-optimizing compiler for a subset of Rust to avoid the assembly. There is great joy in playing stack tetris, but changing code requires a lot of effort. Imagine if there weren't great alternatives, you'd just get good at it.

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I imagine if there weren't compilers (or interpreter) I would never have learned how to code. My generation of programmers was taught with Java and in my university course we did all our homework in the first year using BlueJay, a program that made it _even easier_ to get up and running with a bit of Java code.

(just to save some face: I learned Prolog in my second year).

[sshine]

Yeah, before high-level languages, programming was mostly done by mathematicians and electrical engineers who felt adventurous.

I also had BlueJay on my first semester. But fortunately I had machine architecture, compilers and operating systems later.