Looking at the page, I barely remember those assembler commands. LDX, STA, INX..I’m glad that this is obsolete now. But I wonder how common the knowledge is these days that ultimately, every programming language compiles down to this? Well the equivalent of this on a modern processor, but still.

> But I wonder how common the knowledge is these days ...

In one sense, it is less common, as you imply (though perhaps it's more that the number of high-level programmers have ballooned, rather than that the low-level ones have shrunk).

In another sense, it's more accessible than ever, with tools like godbolt[1][2], VMs, cool profilers that show you a heatmap overlaid on assembly instructions, etc.

And embedded development, where those details matter more, is still going strong, with IoT devices and so forth.

[1] part of a presentation on it, if you're not already familiar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIoZDUd5DKw&t=1191s [2] the site itself: https://godbolt.org/

Why are you glad that it is obsolete? 6502 assembly is severely limited, having only one general purpose register, i.e. the accumulator, and two index registers (but some fun addressing modes), but apart from some quirks, it’s relatively straightforward for a CPU of its size?