A true story: we needed to add substantial modifications to an existing product written in asm (not '51 - AVR, but that's not the point). As this was a low priority task, we gave it out to one of the young guys here who just got his degree (without having learned any asm). He shrugged, printed out the opcodes list, in the following few days he asked a couple of basic questions - and in a week he came with a barely elegant, but otherwise perfectly working solution. Since then, from time to time he keeps managing to squeeze in mote and more functionality into the limited space of that micro, gradually polishing his initial code...

JW