Comment by estimator7292

I firmly believe that all programmers, even you, should be forced to program a microcontroller in assembly at least once.

IMO the utter lack of awareness that our abstractions represent a physical machine with real hardware that operates in finite time is why software today is so bad. Our languages are so far removed from the hardware that the CPU and its finite resources simply don't exist for most programmers. Many of the rising generation of engineers have no clue how a CPU works, what a register is, or what the cost of reading and writing to RAM is.

Assembly is not so difficult as to be unapproachable for beginners. Remember, back in the day we all started in assembly and produced a generation of absolutely brilliant engineers and scientists. We all had to understand the physicality of the real machine and we had to make the best we could with very constrained resources.