[jeffrallen]

Forget advanced features... Without understanding a CPU it's easy to never really understand pointers, and without pointers, it's hard to understand lots of data structures.

I was easily 12 months ahead of other students in my CS education because I learned 6502 assembly in high school. I wish all CS courses started with "make a VM".

[mtzet]

I don’t get this take. Is it so hard to understand that a computer operates on a giant array of bytes?

I think the hard thing to understand is that C’s pointer syntax is backwards (usage follows declaration is weird).

I also think understanding how arrays silently decay to pointers and how pointer arithmetic works in C is hard: ptr+1 is not address+1, but address+sizeof(*ptr)!

Pointers are not hard. C is just confusing, but happens to be the lingua franca for “high level” assembly.

[jeffrallen]

> Is it so hard to understand that a computer operates on a giant array of bytes?

Beginner programming languages universally (since BASIC and Pascal) were designed to hide this fact. There's nothing in a beginning Python course that explains the true nature of computers. You learn about syntax, semantics, namespaces, data structures and libraries. But there's nothing that says, "a computer is endlessly incrementing a counter and executing what it finds where the counter points". And this is probably partly because of "go-to considered harmful", which posited that a lack of control flow (which is a fundamental fact of how computers actually work) is harmful to reasoning about programs.

It's probably objectively true. But a lack of go-to also restricts people from seeing the fundamental truth of the indistinguishable nature of data and instructions in the Von Neumann architecture. Which may also make it difficult to explain GPU computing to students (because it must be understood by contrasting it with Von Neumann architecture).

[wkjagt]

This is very true. I had tried learning C multiple times but pointers were always kind of hard. I kind of understood them but not really. I later spent a lot of time making an OS in assembly for my homebrew 6502 computer, and after that pointers made so much sense. It actually took me a little while to realize that these addresses I was passing around were pointers, and I had started to understand them without realizing it.