A great lesson in the “power of simplicity” and how the best way to solve complex and abstract challenges is in providing a simpler set of primitives. Einstein’s “as simple as possible and no simpler” came up a few times here. Good discussion and historic overview on some of the fundamentals of the lower-level computer programming world (instruction sets & assembly languages). A computer systems fundamentals is helpful but probably not necessary and there will be a bit of redundancy if so.

-TK