[OneLessThing]

I absolutely agree that asm should be taught for computer fundamentals but I really LOL'd at assembly teaching how CPU works without abstraction. There is tons of abstraction below assembly -- see Microcode. It's this mistake in thinking that lets things like spectre/meltdown sit in computers for decades. But for the most part you're right, going down past assembly has not helped me understand __software__.

[konjin]

There are at least three levels of indirection between memory and registers and there is no language that allows you to access that directly.

It lets you see more of the stack but not all of it.

Before I coded in assembly for example I had no idea why string operations in C were so lacking compared to everything else. When you realize that you are literally dealing with bytes in an array of variable length the limitations make a lot more sense.