alt Hacker News> most posters advocating learning assembly language have never had to use it in a production environment... For the overwhelming majority of programmers, assembly offers absolutely no benefit.
I don't follow. Why should assembly have to be useful or pleasant in a production environment, for learning it to be useful?
I was taught a couple different flavours of assembly in university, and I found it quite useful for appreciating what the machine actually does. Certainly more so than C. Abstractions do ultimately have to be rooted in something.
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Is it useful to learn bagpipes? I guess learning for its own sake is good, but if you want to join a band, guitar or keyboards are going to be a better bet and learning bagpipes first isn't going to do much for you.
You and the post you commented on display both a valid point. If we're talking about using assembly as a broad general purpose programming environment that would be a mess (which is precisely why it has no broad adoption). When we talk about assembly as a niché special purpose solution we would come to a different conclusion, coincidentally this is where assembly is still used today: environments where we need highly optimized code.
Your point about education is orthogonal to the point made. I agree with you that learning assembly can be a good way to teach people how computers work on a low level, but that has nothing to do with whether it is useful as a skill to learn.
As someone teaching similar things at the university level to a non-tech audience I have to always carefully wheigh how much "practically useless" lessons a typical art student can stomach. And which kind of lesson will just deter them, potentially forever.