I think it is a great thought experiment and fun project. Perhaps it isn’t practical for many applications, but doing something like this can help a person realize how some of the underlying technologies, software, and frameworks go together, gives you another perspective on things.

I like to do the odd little project in assembly in Linux…not because I couldn’t do it more easily in, Python for example, but because a little taste of assembly gets you thinking about how the machine and the operating system work together. Stepping outside the box a bit is good.

For the sake of efficiency, portability, and so forth we have abstracted and ‘black boxed’ a lot of stuff in the field of programming, and that’s a good thing overall. It allows more productivity and makes it more accessible for more people. The complicated stuff doesn’t go away though, it is still there, written by someone else, deep under the water while most of us skim the surface of things. It is all still coming down to assembly/machine language/ones ‘n zeros somewhere. Diving into the deep water to explore once in a while is a good thing too :)