I don't know if it's still true but as of a few years ago I read that anyone who knows machine, assembly and some of the old languages like Fortran and Cobol are quite in demand for old legacy systems, because alot of the old coders are dying off.
That may not be true anymore because I know there's been quite a bit of investment in upgrades the last few years.
Cool. Maybe I could get a position as a programmer if the current gig doesn't work out. I learned FORTRAN in high school back in the early 1980s, and taught myself some COBOL (mostly to try and impress a young lady who was taking a business class that involved COBOL).
I think that assembly is also used sometimes to fine-tune a compiled executable that was originally written in something like C or C++. The compilers don't always produce the most efficient code, so a programmer with a knowledge of assembly could take a reverse engineered version of the executable translated into assembly, tweak the important bits, and then recompile it back into an executable.
Also, the really good hackers know assembly, usually very well. I remember reading a very thorough analysis somebody did of a piece of malware caught in the wild. The package was very small, but it was still able to keep track of clock cycles while it was executing with enough detail that it could sense if it was being sandboxed and change its execution path accordingly. In other words, when the gaps in clock cycles indicated it was being run in a sandbox, it would run a routine that only did innocuous stuff; when the clock cycles were consistent enough, it would go about doing its bad stuff.
