You're focusing on all the wrong parts: the details. It's not like Steve is saying that you'll be greatly enlightened by memorizing how the IA-64 calling conven

You're focusing on all the wrong parts: the details. It's not like Steve is saying that you'll be greatly enlightened by memorizing how the IA-64 calling convention works. Steve is referring to the skills that you'd learn from solving any large and "algorithmic" problem, with the bonus that compilers will also teach you a bit about the low-level workings of your machine. You'll learn how to represent and manipulate complex data, you'll learn what a calling convention is, what a system call is.