For me, it was my fourth programming language, after BASIC, PDP-8 assembly language, and PDP-8 binary (yes, I wrote binary code so I could toggle it in on the front panel of an early minicomputer).

A few days ago, I ran into an online post where someone pointed out the book “Learn to Program with Assembly” and asked if anyone had ever learned assembly language as a first programming ...

They’d trained a language model to add two numbers—it had just taken a lot more time than anybody thought it should.

Assembly language isn’t really one language, though. Every chip speaks its own dialect. Of course there are similarities: every CPU has an add function, right?