OK I will rise to it...
Decades ago I learned not to hire someone who had never programmed assembler, even if I only wanted them to write Visual Basic. Some concept of what on earth a computer actually is turns out to be rather useful, at any level!
Wow that would have been tough to get to work for you. Would love to know what your writing that requires specifically assembly knowledge.
.net is a runtime environment which supports software written by programmers who generally have no idea how to program.
Which is the general idea of it, with the OS environments changing so quickly one of the points of the .net framework is to protect the developer from those changes (whilst also protecting them from themselves).
There is alot more to the CLR than just noddy programmers using it for winforms or netforms development - if you look at say the CLR integration into SQL Server you will find a secure platform for extensibility that will not bring down (easily) your server platform. Very much more dangerous in the old ODS way of doing things.
Whilst I can see merits in what you have both said - off the cuff comments like that devalue what serious coders can and do complete with the technology and how good they are to leverage the most out of the platform(s).
The lack of being able to manage your memory properly yourself is a big hindrance, but in terms of having a stable and forgiving platform I dont think it can be rivalled at the moment maybe not even with Java.
Assembly is all well and good but when your processor changes you need to recode to take advantages of those changes to their full extent. You also have the problem with 2GL languages as such that debugging is a very time consuming and costly excercise - memory leaks are common and a nightmare to debug.
Move on to a 3gl such as C++ and it becomes slightly easier but the problems still persist - now if the world of software development was full of purists it would be a mixture of assembly and C++ but in todays environment it is too slow and too costly.
So rather than slate .net and programmers of it - lets stick to the thread and talk about this problem rather than nostalgic views on how programming was sooo much better in the day when it was a fine art mastered by a select few.
And to answer any doubts I am a .net programmer at the moment, but I am also proficient in C++, x86 and 680x0 assembly.
Regards,
Jof
p.s. saying it was decades ago you learned not to trust non assembly programmers means little - "decades" ago (as in 25 years +) there was almost no option but assembly - mr gates was just about to go into his baptism of fire.