alt Hacker NewsBecause these are the primatives that are in use when programming in any language, and there is a benefit to learning the primatives before learning higher level abstractions. For instance we teach arithmetic before calculus.
I see lots of people become pretty helpless when their framework isn’t working as expected or abstraction becomes leaky. Most people don’t really need to know assembly in order to get past this, but the general intuition of “there is something underneath the subtraction that I could understand” is very useful.
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> For instance we teach arithmetic before calculus.
I don’t think that’s a fitting analogy.
Nearly everyone on the planet uses (basic) arithmetic. Very few use calculus.
By contrast, very few (programmers) use ASM, but nearly all of them use higher level languages.
I think comparing assembly with arithmetic is dead wrong. Arithmetic is something that you use constantly in virtually any mathematical activity you will ever do, at least at the under-graduate level. There is literally 0 calculus, statistics, or algebra you could understand if you didn't know arithmetic.
In contrast, you can have a very successful, very advanced career in computer science or in programming without once in your life touching a line of assembler code. It's not very likely, and you'll be all the poorer for it, but it's certainly possible.
Assembly language is much more like learning the foundations of mathematics, like Hilbert's program (except, of course, historically that came a few millenia after).
The primitives of control flow in programming languages are sequencing, if, while, for, switch, return, and "early return" (goto restricted to exit a containing block). We might compile these into a form that represents everything using conditional jumps, unconditional jumps, and jump tables, but that's not how people think about it, definitely not at the level of programming languages (and even in the compiler IR phase, we're often mentally retranslating the conditional jump/unconditional jump model back into the high-level control flows).
And I could go on with other topics. High-level languages, even something like C, are just a completely different model of looking at the world from machine language, and truly understanding how machines work is actually quite an alien model. There's a reason that people try to pretend that C is portable assembler rather than actually trying to work with a true portable assembler language.
The relationship you're looking for is not arithmetic to calculus, but set theory to arithmetic. Yes, you can build the axioms of arithmetic on top of set theory as a purer basis. But people don't think about arithmetic in terms of set theory, and we certainly don't try to teach set theory before arithmetic.