alt Hacker NewsI've used "machine code" plenty of times in production as inline assembly encoded in other languages.
I vaguely recall ada inline assembly looking like function calls, with arguments that sometimes referenced high-level-language variables)
unrelated to that, I distinguish between machine code which is binary/hex, and assembly as symbolic assembler or macro assembler, which can actually have high level macros and other niceties.
And one thing I can say for sure. I took assembly language as my second computer course, and it definitely added a lifelong context as to how machines worked, what everything translated to and whether it was fast or efficient.
LOL. As a poor college student, I couldn't even afford an assembler. Programming my CoCo (Radio Shack Color Computer) had to be done either with the built-in BASIC, or by POKEing in machine codes for programs that I hand assembled. One of the nice things about Motorola (CoCo was based on MC6809E) assembly languages is that the processors were very regular and it was easy to remember the opcodes and operation structures.
A friend of mine who also had a CoCo wrote an assembler as a term project.