I almost never see this as a justification, but machine languages make it a lot easier to understand all kinds of computing topics. Things like assignment, poi

I almost never see this as a justification, but machine languages make it a lot easier to understand all kinds of computing topics. Things like assignment, pointers, variable/value confusion, etc., that trip up novices in any high-level language are fairly trivial to understand if you teach them with machine language. People talk about a bimodal distribution in CS classes, and suggest that some people just can't learn these topics well. Perhaps I'm naive, but I have a hard time believing that they are incapable of learning these fundamentals if presented using machine language.