The storyline backing this article is not just distracting, it is misinformative: it teaches people the wrong indirect lessons about software and engineering :/. If you don't have an assembler, you write an assembler, you don't just make do without and try to bootstrap directly from a C compiler; and if you have the luxury of extra hands and need people to work on stuff in parallel--stuff you can't run yet anyway as if you don't have really simple things like true coded I bet you don't have a shell (and there are only a scant couple reasons true would even exist if you don't have a shell that exposes branch comparisons as shell commands)--you don't set them to work building the binaries by hand, you give them a rough outline of a programming language you will have available at the right point in the development cycle (maybe you throw them a C89 manual, as manuals still seem to exist in this world?) and tell them to write it in that on the promise that it will be useful later.