what about those poor saps who use PICs they are stuck with ASM and BASIC
Don't knock it 'til you've tried it, kid. One of the greatest learning experiences you can have as a coder is bare-metal hex-editing or other similar hand-assembly. You'll learn a lot, and it makes you really appreciate what we have available today.
But even that isn't hardcore.
Know who Charles Babbage is? Then you should know who the first computer hacker was. She was Babbage's protégé, and helped to explain to others exactly how his proposed Analytical Engine was to work. She wrote its first programs, in its assembler mneumonics. She had no hardware to test it with. Years later it was found that, using emulators, her programs worked. She predicted the use of computers to play chess, compose music, along with a variety of other tasks. She postulated on the idea of programming a computer to think like a human (AI). Sadly, she died young (and painfully) of cancer.
Her name was Lady Ada Lovelace.
That's hardcore.