I did 6502 in high school from a book and later did 6809 (EE class) and 8088 in college. The funny part was our compiler target for the CSci Compiler Course was an IBM 370 on which they taught the required assembler course. Of that group I liked the 6809 best. The 370 was ok and it sure had a lot more registers. We didn't write our compilers in assembly, but instead used the department's chosen language: Modula-2. It was very odd translating from the dragon book to Modula-2.

NB: Just a comment, could not (yet) watch the video. Our course was very simple with 8051 compiled with IAR, IIRC. I hated the experience: quite a lot of logic is backwards and you have to come up with something like ABI in order not to make huge mess.

Anyway, this actually skyrocketed my understanding of C: C is nothing more than (rather thin, I would say) wrappers around assembly, which in turn is wrappers around machine instructions. That's why C is fast. That's why you cannot have first-class functions, return multiple (compile time unknown) values, etc..

But nothing beats spending 10+ hours debugging simple I2C (or SPI, can't remember) baremetal ARM program, first weeding out vendor libs, then actually diving into assembly only to find out that CPU is buggy.

This is similar to what I experienced, sort of like an enlightenment moment. In C, I see a thin veneer over assembly, but that veneer has been designed to look thicker than it actually is. I came to appreciate the abstraction and now understand why it's so long lived.

Argh! Modula-2, that brings back memories. They were still teaching it as an introductory language when I went to uni in 1997. The language seemed a tad irrelevant.

It wasn't bad and did well to teach a lot of concepts, but it being on an IBM 370 made for some pain. I will say XEDIT did have some ok features but was a painful experience overall.