I read that as "directly, without a compiler", in which case it's close to fair, although I would have still put it ahead of COBOL because sometimes it's necessary.

[–] 0x0@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 points 16 hours ago (1 children)

Should it not say "machine code" then? It would still be bizarre to call it obsolete, given that it's literally the foundation of all the other languages in the chart. It's like saying letters are obsolete because we have words now.

[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 0 points 16 hours ago* (last edited 16 hours ago)

Why? An assembler isn't the same thing as a compiler. (Although, I'm not personally sure where the dividing line is. Where would literally just an assembler with loops instead of goto classify?)

The practice of directly using assembly is relatively obsolete. To bootstrap you might have to a bit, but writing Rollercoaster Tycoon in it was already an anachronism. I'm not really sure how to fit that into your analogy, because there's no word-compilers in wide use. If voice-to-text had became that dominant, typing would be obsolete, I guess.