The lost art (Was: The VAX is running

I agree, assembly language can be great if it is used properly. In my experience, PC software nowadays is written and embedded into Excel. That's great in that you don't have to worry about the headaches of Windows itself, but you can't access the raw power of the hardware directly as it's going through Excel, then Windows before it finally reaches the hardware and by that time you would have wasted a fair bit of computing power. The software I come across at work that hasn't been embedded in Excel is often buggy (even with something as simple as inserting a blank line into a data table!). Now I'm not in a position of power (sadly), but if that were my company I would be very angry that such simple bugs didn't get picked up in the testing (unless we did no testing to save money!).