alt Hacker NewsI think lots of commenters are being unintentionally pedantic. It’s clear that there are different types of abstractions one is concerned with when programming at the application level. Yes, it’s all abstractions on top of subatomic probability fields, but no one is thinking at even the atomic level when they step through the machine code execution with a debugger.
The one abstraction you would have to keep in mind with assembler (writing more than reading tho) is the cache hierarchy. The days of equal cost to read/write any memory location are ancient. Even in the old 8 bit days some memory was faster to access than others (e.g. 6502 zero page).
The flags are another abstraction that might not mean what it says. The 6502 N flag and BPL/BMI instructions really just test bit 7 and aren't concerned with whether the value is really negative/positive.