This isn't crankyness. If you try to generalise the thoughts on asm/C then it boils down to this:

- Abstractions will always be leaky

and

- be prepared for when an abstraction leaks.

As for the ideology part:

think for yourself and try to see beyond the hype

And I have to say I absolutely agree.

For example, I've written maybe a handful of lines of assembly, and maybe as many lines of inline assembly. However, understanding assembly language has saved me many times. Compiler bugs exist. Sometimes you don't have access to debug info and a debugger, just the instruction pointer and a register dump. Sometimes the compiler just can't optimise well enough.

C is just one level of abstraction higher, so that's probably the level that's going to leak through when your high-level-language interpreter fails for some bizarre reason. (recent Ruby segfaults anyone?)

It's not turtles all the way down, but rather a menagerie of different abstractions, and it's useful to know your zoology, as it were.