I feel kinda sad that macro assembly is a lost branch of the programming language tree. to me it feels pretty lisp-like in that its more of an exercise in world-building than 'a then b then c'. it also makes it alot more feasible to use all those interesting processor-specific frobs.
I guess assemblers would have had to have evolved past fighting over intel vs at&t.
I mean, I think it suffers the same problem as lisp on that front. If you're coming into a codebase would you rather read boring C or try to figure out the mind of the person who crafted the lisp/macros in it?
Even C codebases can suffer this with obnoxiously clever macros, but it's rarer at least.
I guess assemblers would have had to have evolved past fighting over intel vs at&t.