I think this always scares/annoys certain programmers. See comments near the bottom of every thread that suggests learning assembly, including this one.
I think it scares/annoys programmers who do not know assembly and will never learn it.
The simple fact is that knowing assembly and C anyone one can build whatever other language anyone else is using. These are the building blocks. It's simply a lexer and a parser away.
Your favorite scripting language was probably built with C. If for no other reason than superior performance. Even if you writing in Lisp/Scheme, you probably also do some C code generation. C is unavoidable.
And the guy that knows assembly and C is probably a better C programmer than the one who doesn't know assembly.
This probably makes some programmers uncomfortable. Why else would they argue against anyone teaching or learning assembly, or make excuses why they will not learn it?
Probably. I could be wrong here, and of course there are always exceptions. But I consistently see the same sort of comments trying to argue against anyone else teaching or learning assembly. There must be a reason for it.
Of course this only applies to GNU make.