Your Assembly/Visual Basic question is going to be badly biased. The barrier to entry with VB is lower, so you'll see more low-skill programmers. This reduces t

Your Assembly/Visual Basic question is going to be badly biased. The barrier to entry with VB is lower, so you'll see more low-skill programmers. This reduces the average competence of the entire cohort, but doesn't tell you anything about the high-skill users. Now if you could show that learning assembly led to better programming skills, you'd be talking about something similar. I suspect that a comparison of introductory programming via assembly vs a modern high-level language would find lower overall proficiency in the assembly group, although a few students would do fine. Personally, I suspect that there isn't anything particularly unique about using an abacus, compared to other manipulation techniques. These are probably all superior to calculators, which are generally awful.