alt Hacker News> 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'd say every programmer uses the constructs in assembly. Just because we have layers and layers of abstraction on top of that doesn't mean it's not valuable to understand the far simpler world that it all sits upon (Granted I understand it sits upon machine code, not assembly, but assembly is probably the closest to machine code that is more human interpret-able without significant effort).
My first language was BASIC on a V-tech. It's not quite the same but it still was such a fantastic starting point.
I've tried luring people into programming with Python for example and see them get frustrated by the amount of abstractions and indirection going on. I am really starting to like this idea of starting with assembly.