At the risk of starting another language war, I must say that I don't believe as strongly as KaiRu that FPGAs are the future, certainly they are a part of the future, but GPUs are better for some tasks.
It is the case that more HFT is done in C/
C++ than GPUs and FPGAs combined, some even use Java.
FPGAs simply take longer to be changed even if they execute faster and currently the automated generation produces output that's rather less optimal than hand build.
As for the question of why learn Assembler, I teach an outline of this on the CQF
C++ course because if you understand what the machine is doing you can write better code. Teaching multi-threading is actually
easier if you take a mechanical view of sets of registers iterating through memory spaces, as one example.
Also there is a requirement for people to program network cards and/or device drivers, much of this can be done in C but the standard required for HFT mean that you're unlikely to be great without some knowledge of assembler, indeed there is a synergy between FPGAs and assembler skills.
Note I'm not saying that FPGAs are doomed or an unwise choice, just that they are a
choice not single inevitability.
I encounter people who don't know what a processor stack is and for whom looking at the registers to try and understand why a nasty calculation bug is happening is beyond them. Some don't know the difference between read only and constant and find it hard to imagine how their high level language code gets translated. Most of us never need to know all that much assembler and it's pretty rare now that I write any, but the analogy I'd draw is that an engineer might usefully at a high level model a bridge as a network of vectors but unless he knows about the crystalline structure of metals then metal fatigue will come as a nasty shock.
That forms part of a definition of an expert: one who can choose between multiple levels of abstraction in his work. A bridge is vectors, metals, a node in a transport network, a series of discounted cash flows, a terrorist target and a tourist attraction.
If you want to be the guy in charge of bridges you need all of those views, ditto HFT where one mixes market microstructure,
C++, poker,Level Zero ethernet, poker and internal politics over who gets the bonus
As a career counsellor a common problem I try to help people fix is that over specialisation has left them unappreciated and sometime vulnerable to changes in fashion that leaves their speciality in the cold.But just in case you think that's easy, recall that to get a job you must also show excellence in a speciality.