To our dismay, users who had been enduring several hour waits between jobs run under batch processing were suddenly restless when response times were… - Fernando J. Corbató

Clearly, one can obfuscate one's ideas with a compiler language but it's harder. To some extent one is talking about what one wants rather than how one wants to do it. The trouble with machine code, of course, is that when you look at a random section of machine code you don't know what properties of the instructions the programmer really wanted to exploit.

Because one has to be an optimist to begin an ambitious project, it is not surprising that underestimation of completion time is the norm.

Regardless of whether one is dealing with assembly language or compiler language, the number of debugged lines of source code per day is about the same!