Although I sympathize with this line of thought, remember that we’re all uninitiated by the standards of a few decades ago. The time was when you were uninitiated if you couldn’t hand assemble your programs to a series of hex digits. Indeed, I own a copy of a book aimed at children that teaches you how to do just that for the BBC Micro and ZX Spectrum. (The publisher released it as a free PDF if anyone is curious: https://yurichev.com/mirrors/machine-code-for-beginners.pdf)
I agree with what you are saying, and probably it is part of the nature of progress to continually move some of the core topics out of the realm of CS common knowledge to make way for the new. However I think not all things are created equal.
For instance, I think basically everyone can agree that moving from assembly to C and other high-level languages was basically a strict upgrade, and obviated the need for assembly programming in all but a few specific use cases.
By contrast, using the command line and shell programming is every bit as relevant as it was 20 years ago, and I don't see that changing any time soon.
Both assembly and the shell are difficult and alienating to newcomers. But learning is mostly academic at this point, while learning the other opens up entire new worlds in terms of what you can do with a computer.
In other words, learning assembly is like learning latin. Maybe interesting, but not particularly useful. Learning bash is like learning Chinese. Not particularly easy, but there's a lot you can do with it right now.
that PDF is awesome and i have never seen it before. i had to teach someone about programming from absolute zero and i followed a very similar approach. starting with what a transistor is, a basic intro into a cpu, what machine code is, low level languages and high level languages which took us into a python hello world. you could see the wheels turning at the end of the session...
That sounds amazing. It makes me want to learn more about transistors, and how CPUs actually work at an EE level. My studies started with registers and machine code as the "ground truth" - but it would be cool to have an intuition about what is actually physically happening inside the CPU and memory.
