Real Programmers Writing Assembly Code in Any Language

In my experience, when people have excess difficulty coding algorithms in C, it's often because they are tightly coupling their data structure management with their algorithm instead of creating appropriate abstractions. For example, manually manipulating linked list pointers everywhere instead of making push() and pop() functions. They are too accustomed to having those abstractions provided to them.

While this problem is much more evident with lower level abstractions, failure to recognize tight coupling and create appropriate abstractions is a problem at any level. Practicing these skills in C until you can make an algorithm that looks clean and readable will carry over to any language you use.

The other problem I occasionally see among python programmers is difficulty adapting for performance at scale. Granted, performance isn't usually the primary concern, but the most pythonic way to implement an algorithm for a relatively small data structure can grind your system to a halt when you're working with gigabytes or more of data. Becoming a good C programmer helps you be more aware of those kinds of issues in any language.

Can you learn those skills in other languages? Sure, but C helps by making it a lot more obvious when you get it wrong.

That being said, I use python for algorithmic programming when I have a choice, even though I'm just as comfortable in C. Python has language features that make it very nice for that kind of programming, and performance differences are usually negligible. I can't speak to why other programmers who know both would choose C. I imagine a lot of them do it simply to set themselves apart from the crowd.

People have written assemblers in machine code. They've also written then in assembly language--often a subset of the language they translate themselves, so they start with a simple "bootstrap" version of the assembler, then add features to it as they need them for the assembler itself.

However, none of this is particularly a necessity. In the end, an assembler is a (usually fairly) simple translation program. It takes in a file in one (text) format, and writes out a file in another (usually an object file format).

The fact that the text that's input represents machine instructions in a textual format and the result represents the same instructions in binary format doesn't make much difference to the language that's used to implement the assembler--in fact, even higher languages than C such as SNOBOL and Python can work quite nicely--I (fairly) recently worked on an assembler written in Python, and it worked pretty well for the job.

As far as how you bootstrap things initially: typically on another machine that has decent development tools and such. If you're developing new hardware, you usually start by writing a simulator (or at least emulator) for the new machine anyway, so at first you're building and running the code on some host system in any case.