Earlier quoted context omitted.
This subthread wasn't really restricting itself to writing games in assembly languages. Multiple ancestor posts were talking about "tools" in general, including approaches and IDEs, like sdrothrock expanded in an ancestor post. If you're arguing specifically that using an assembly language is less productive than a higher level language, then I fully agree with you.
Ok, what other tools are we talking about, then? :) Somehow I doubt these die-hard ex Nintendo devs are insisting on using Emacs or Lisp. I'd say those are "modern" tools anyway, in the sense that they still hold revolutionary insights for modern software development -- and also probably were NOT used for Nintendo games.
You're focusing on specifics, whereas I had been focusing on the more general theme of the thread.
To me, the theme, as set by icebraining, was generally: "does modern game programming benefit from using tools of old?"
Here, "tools" is a very general word, not limited to just assembly languages. sdrothrock expanded a little by saying "languages/approaches/IDEs", and "approaches" and "IDEs" are also very general words.
Your post, to which I initially responded, was:
> But why? There's a reason we don't use the old tools anymore.
Because old tools typically do have niche communities of varying size using them, I take "we" to mean "the majority of programmers".
So I understand your argument to be (I hope I'm not mistaken): "There should be no reason to use old tools, because there must be a valid reason why the majority are not using them anymore."
It's this reasoning that I disagree with. The reason the majority are not using them is because the majority of them look to use what the majority are using. It's a positive feedback loop. The remaining users, the ones that decided to use a modern tool before it was popular, probably chose to use it mostly based on a very important decision that can be made for any tool: how easy is it to learn how to use?
Now, a typically inversely correlated feature to this is: how powerful/flexible is it?
As examples, think of the choice of Vim or Emacs vs Visual Studio or Eclipse, or the choice of CLI vs GUI. It's a choice between ease of use (the popular choice) vs power/flexibility. Most will chose ease of use, but we shouldn't underestimate the importance of the minorities that chose otherwise.
So to answer your question, "why?", in the post I had given, I was providing examples of tools that are considered "old" but still held benefits over modern tools. The point was to answer your question in the general context, rather than suggest for them to use something specifically.
Now, if we talk specifically about what an ex Nintendo dev can do with their old tools, I've have no idea. :P But if it's true that "a lot of them have refused to adapt", like sdrothrock said, while it might be simply due to learning inertia, I would also consider the possibility that there might be something that was lost to the majority that might be worth recovering, something that that niche would consider important enough to keep.
I don't know what kind of system you use, but if it involves use of a command line, consider that many think it old and useless. They'd ask, "But why? there is a reason we're not using CLIs anymore. After all, there's GUIs!". Here is a highly upvoted StackExchange question asking just that:
https://ux.stackexchange.com/questions/101990/why-are-termin...