My father still uses assembly language, on 8-bit Motorola (now NXP via Freescale) microprocessors. He's ben doing it since the early 80s, for data monitoring and control devices for various applications in agriculture, industry, academia and other sectors.

I've been working with him for the past few years to modernise his products and give them a future beyond his retirement, which is finally happening now (he's 74).

The device we've been working is an agricultural data monitor that reads from sensors in the soil and atmosphere (measuring impedance, voltage, pulse and digital signals), stores it in local flash memory then periodically uploads it via to my web app via a U-Blox cellular/IoT modem.

It's amazing what he's been able to make it do, and how simple/cheap the componentry is and how low the power consumption is. And whilst the coding and debugging is pretty slow and laborious, once it works, it's incredibly reliable and stable.

Now he's retiring, if the business is to continue we'll basically have to find someone who can migrate it to higher level platforms and languages. There aren't many (any?) people around willing/able to work with this kind of assembly code these days.

It feels like a shame. Other players doing this kind of work use higher-level platforms, which may be faster to develop for and debug but are more costly to manufacture, use more power and are less reliable.

I'm hoping we can find a balance between the easier/faster development cycle of newer platforms, whilst retaining at least some of the simplicity and elegance of my father's approach.