Comment Re:Assembly == SLOW ; JAVA == FAST! (Score 1) 372
"Yeah, outside a few rather narrow cases, modern CPUs have just gotten too complicated to write efficient assembly for."
You say this as if there were some other way. But when you code in a higher level language, the compiler mechanically translates what you wrote into assembly before handing it off to the assembler to actually generate the object anyway. Compilers have certainly seen a lot of improvement but compiler generated assembler code still tends to be awful, and a good assembler programmer will always be able to beat it if given a chance.
I suspect what has really happened is simply that employers are heavily biased towards cheap and quick, and assembler isnt optimal there. And that in turn has resulted in fewer people learning assembler, making it even harder and more expensive to do things that way, sort of a vicious circle.