>The famous "Story of Mel" was about a programmer in the late 1950s refusing to use those newfangled optimized assemblers rather than writing machine code directly.

IIRC, K&R said something similar in the first edition of their C book (referring to others' imagined reactions about the C strcmp function:

"What, you mean I have to call a function to compare two strings?"

They went on to add that they had tried to make C function call overhead quite low, to handle this issue.