I worked with ASN.1 for a few years in the embedded space because its used for communications between aircraft and air traffic control in Europe [1]. I enjoyed it. BER encoding is pretty much the tightest way to represent messages on the wire and when you're charged per-bit for messaging, it all adds up. When a messaging syntax is defined in ASN.1 in an international standard (ICAO 9880 anyone?), its going to be around for a while. Haven't been able to get my current company to adopt ASN.1 to replace our existing homegrown serialization format.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeronautical_Telecommunication...