[xxs]

>C led to an atrophy of assembly muscles.

This is not true, though. Technically I don't do C but I used to do Assembly. Yet in Java code paths, to have a decent proof (and satisfactory results) of the optimizations made by JIT, PrintAssembly still works.

Assembly is not just the raw instructions that trigger microcode or knowing the latency of each one of them, or the (un)expected cache misses, it's the understanding the hardware, itself.