I absolutely LOVE assembly/machine language. I think in hexadecimal, I dream in mnemonics! Where the rubber meets the road is my programming passion. HLLs are a crutch that gets between the programmer and the machine and contributes to inefficient code - but nobody cares about inefficient code these days and it shows. 1 MB for a "hello world" program and latency, latency, latency everywhere! I'm convinced that most of these code monkeys grinding out this crap code never saw the inside of a CS-101 class. I've seen my share of stupidity coming from the biggest software companies in the world that would have earned an "F" in any first semester CS class - I would have been FIRED for cause if I had written code that bad.
Don't get me wrong, HLLs certainly have their place - and I enjoy "some" of them. I did a bit of FORTRAN and it was OK, COBOL has very nice syntax from what I can see, but I never did much with it. I just don't grok the reason why ALGOL's horrid syntax has taken over the world, even though I've done a fair amount of coding in Pascal. C is just damn near unreadable - its seems every C program is a candidate for the obfuscated C code contest. A few more letters in the language's reserved words wouldn't be a bad thing (ala Pascal) - the days of 110 baud TTYs are long gone, yet this cryptic language remains king. I do respect its power and flexibility, but I want better syntax.
OTOH, I certainly wrote my share of spaghetti code in BASIC!
