I mean, it sounds weird now, but back then the assembler would indeed have eaten up precious CPU time.

Imagine if, nowadays, a grad student took a node in a scientific cluster to run Dreamweaver in a Windows VM instead of writing HTML by hand. (Sorry, it's the closest analogy I could come up with)

von Neumann was probably the most intelligent person ever documented.

He was probably frustrated that people couldn't see the machine code fully formed in their mind's eye :)

Agreed! I also think that von Neumann (and some of his contemporaries as well) were likely the last to be able to understand the entire breadth of math, physics, and computer science at the time. These days we’re all far too specialized…

Oh, the brief time in computing history when computer time was more expensive than human time.

If you take into account that the particular humans whose time was (not) valued here were graduate students, that time may not have been so brief after all.

highlights the point that not valuing either will waste both

WOW. J.A.N. Lee taught my intro to programming in C++ course back in '99. He retired during my undergrad.