It's worth learning as the prima facie example of a high-level language on top of the register memory model. http://canonical.org/~kragen/memory-models/ http:/

It's worth learning as the prima facie example of a high-level language on top of the register memory model. http://canonical.org/~kragen/memory-models/ http://canonical.org/~kragen/memory-models/ Its perceived close relationship to the machine is precisely due to the fact that it exposes pointers & does not handle its own memory allocation with a garbage collector, both of which are direct consequences of the register model. Why not Assembly? Because it's not a language that encodes propositions first class, and that's the grounding for structured/procedural programming. The majority of software requires some structured element and so regressing towards the assembly model, where abstractions are implicit, doesn't get new programmers on the path to understanding how to write nearly all software.