Sammy,
I was actually talking about assembler. I've seen good programmers come in and get spanked by having to code at such a low-level. I still code assembler quite frequently, and for sheer performance, if you are a good assembler programmer, you can produce a program that runs circles around something written in other languages.
But, then you don't program GUIs in assembler. Mainly, when I do write code, I write APIs written in assembler for guys who code in C/C++. They've sent me to 3 weeks of training on C/C++, but I really dont like the language at all. I fell in love with Pascal, which IMO (and it ain't a humble one), Pascal is a very elegant and beautiful language, while C/C++ are crude, ugly, and lean towards people who like to code programs only they can understand.
A real programmer to me is someone who not only knows the language, but knows the platform it runs on. A person who is intimate with the instruction set, knows the registers, and storage regions of the platform. Not just another techy wannabe who can generate bloated code with the best of them.
But I digress.