> This is some weird gatekeep-y kinda thing. Most of us didn't start out with low-level programming. Wouldn't it have been odd and frustrating for someone to te

> This is some weird gatekeep-y kinda thing. Most of us didn't start out with low-level programming. Wouldn't it have been odd and frustrating for someone to tell your younger self that you have "never written C and probably never will"? I'm not making any sorts of demands about who should be able to program at a low level, but I'm being realistic about who will. I have an intuition that I do not think is unreasonable that the vast majority of the 20- to 30-something crowd that recently learned JavaScript in a boot camp would bounce off of systems programming hard, while a handful might discover it's what they should've been doing all along. The young are not who I'm thinking of at all. Someone with time and neuroplasticity can and should be spending that time toying around with C, Haskell, and Lisp to expand their understanding as much as possible.