Should assembly language be taught in an introductory course (or soon after)?

manpreet Best Answer 2 years ago

Should ye ole' fashioned assembly language be taught to help students develop a sense of how actual underlying computational hardware supports/allows running their higher-level or more abstract software?

Something with (a limited amount of) a linear address space (global state memory) and a program counter with jumps (conditional control flow or GOTOs).

Using something like Knuth's MIX, or the CARDIAC cardboard computer (this was actually used to teach programming in an introductory computing for non-programmers course I audited at Berkeley in the late '70's), or perhaps an emulator for an 8-bit retro-computer (such as Apple II or Altair) that can run inside a web browser.