An interesting parallel because there were undoubtedly some people who worried we would lose something important in the craft of instruction-level programming, and almost certainly we have in relative terms. But in absolute numbers I am confident we have more low-level programmers than we did before Fortran.

And if I were to jump into instruction-level programming today I would start by asking an LLM where to begin...

Fortran was a much larger jump in productivity than agentic coding...

Yet here we are, with more demand for developers than ever