I agree with everything you said here. I'm not saying we should stick to bare metal programming even if we aren't doing embedded. There may be a problem that co

I agree with everything you said here. I'm not saying we should stick to bare metal programming even if we aren't doing embedded. There may be a problem that could be solved easily with inline assembly or there may be a bug that can't be understood if the programmer doesn't understand what is going on at the CPU level. Assembler is a tool in my kit, but not everybody needs to use it. I like to understand my computer from top to bottom, but sticking to higher level abstractions is where I spend most of my time.