Yeah when I had finally peeled back the layers all the way to asm I had this moment of enlightenment. Personally I think the time it took me to peel back those layers was wasted and I wish I had started with asm rather than a HLL. I think it would be much better for students to move on to HLLs once they see the need for automating certain things. Knuth was right to use a synthetic assembly language rather than a HLL for the The Art of Computer Programming.
Knuth's "Structured Programming with Go To Statements" is also a good read and explicitly points out how high-level languages make certain ways of expressing algorithms hard or impossible.
