In previous semesters, some students would spend days or even weeks trying to find bugs in their programs. This is mostly what made the course difficult. This will not happen in this course. You will spend less time debugging, and more time writing programs. I'd like to keep the writing to a minumum.
Nobody uses it.
That's not entirely true. Many of you will have successful and enjoyable careers never writing a single line of assembly language. But a few of you will join firms developing ebedded systems, or you may even work at Intel, Motorola, ARM, MIPS, or IBM, where a lot of low level design and programming takes place. When a brand new microprocessor or computer system is developed, often all you start out with is an assembler-and maybe not even that. Working with something new is very exciting, and knowing assembly language qualifies you for this kind of work.