a virtual machine

[Skaperen]

Out of interest, why do you think it necessary to introduce students to machine language?

Microcode isn't usually taught to anyone but electronics engineers these days. Who would need the next level up of machine code?

it would not be for all students. it would be for those that need, or want, to learn how computers work all the way down to the bare metal, such as the engineer types (electrical engineers, computer engineers). i still find that those who know machine language have a better perspective on things like embedded systems.

a friend of mine who was not into computers at all signed up for "a computer class" when he was in college (where i worked). it turns out it was a PDP-11 machine language class in EE. i had to help him a lot through it. he had expected it to be more analog oriented for his "music technology" track. but at least he passed. today, he could not write a hello world program in any language and ended up running a technology oriented investing company. but he still understands the scope of computers from top to bottom and tells me that having taken that class has helped him a lot even though he never wrote any programs since college.

maybe computers in a few decades will be such that no one needs to learn machine language. maybe programs will automatically code compiler builders and emulator builders for us and we won't know, or need to know, or care, which it is. but, we are not there, yet. dream on.