ASM, everyone?

Tech savy... ASM is actually means Assembly Language (or Assembly Machine Language... can't remember) is among the lowest level of programming language nowadays. In a recent article I read just now Slashdot | Is Assembly Programming Still Relevant, Today? I notice that the debat is more or less focus on the usefulness of ASM. I've seen ASM codes (but I'm not the coder) and they are quite programmer's nightmare if they do not know ASM well (like me) ASM is useful for direct comunication with the hardware, and normally are used to speed up or obtimize certain routines that are slow in other higher level language. There's a point that I like mentioned in the thread, a lot of people are coding their programs to run in multi-Ghz machine. This is a kind of trend that I actually notice quite long ago, that people are always aiming to make program for latest machine.

Not really to blame them (because I'm used to be the same), since it was fairly simple to ignore the optimization coding that was pretty hard to maintain, and sometimes it was more fairly simple (simpler readability) to write a program than to build a program that's optimize for speed. I remember someone post a solution for a simple routine to check wheter input receipt is letters. The *stupid* routine is to loop through all the input characters and check their ASCII codes. Well, not exactly wrong, but there's simpler method for such solution that are proven faster in ASM. For most of new programmers nowadays, ASM is not learned (except for some courses and engineering) and so they do not know the importance of ASM.