[akmiller]

> Programmers don't write things in assembly because today's compilers can write much better assembly than pretty much anyone.

I don't buy that statement. In college we'd write a small program in assembler, then write that same program in C and compare the generated assembler code. The generated code was always longer than the hand-written code and often times significantly longer.

The main reason we don't write assembler anymore is we don't need to!