I agree, people often tend to use too low level languages, but there are also good reasons to use Assembly, just like for about any language. In most cases people had a good reason to implement a language and if there are still compilers and interpreters, which maybe even continue to evolve that's a good indication for a using a language.

And Assembly... well, when I think about boot loaders, operating system, that 64k ego shooter, implementations of (for example cryptographic) algorithms and how some things are actually easier to do in Assembly, because it is low level then that's enough reason.

And if you have fun doing so than it is more than enough reason. I mean if you don't do stuff for fun (and curiosity) in some way, I wouldn't call someone a good scientist. A passionate programmer, no matter what language usually gets stuff done.

I mean, here we often talk about things on a kinda philosophical level, but especially when you do some assembly it's just doing stuff and I mean even using a higher, more modern language they usually don't guarantee any of the things that make you better. I often see code that looks like C or Java by just ignoring how a language was designed.

I mean we just came to a point where functional programming languages (which actually can be and are pretty simple, when you think about what you need for lambda) and on the other hand loose touch with everything else. Of course, abstraction. That's what it is for. You can forget about it, but that doesn't mean it's good to not know about it.

> complexities of some specific piece of hardware nobody will be using in twenty years.

Is that so? I mean one is usually still having some kind of interface, because of backward compatibility. And even if it is like that, is it really a problem. Everything changes, what counts is experience, learning from mistakes, ... That's usually very generic and that's the stuff that you spend time on and that will allow you to make stuff quicker.