I had C64. I "programmed" in BASIC. Which means I typed in programs from manual (which was in German, and I couldn't understand it), and changed stuff to see what will be the effect. I've never went into 6502 assembler (I had no books for it), but I learned that I want to be a programmer, and that was what was important. When I got PC I tried QBasic, Turbo Pascal, Assembler, C, Delphi, and everything else. Distance from metal was never issue for me. The issue was the idea I had, and the end product I wanted to achieve. Hell, I've written small logic game with Turbo Basic, that was one huge for loop (with counter that went to 99999999 or sth like that, because I didn't knew of loops without countter) with 5 screens of nested if then elses inside. It was about guessing words letter by letter, and I didn't knew about arrays, so I had 5 variables A1$, a2$, a3$, a4$ and a5$ for letters.

It was horrible, but I didn't knew it. And it worked. I've shown it in school, and to my parents, and I was a wizard. The methodology, and style conventions came later.

I think of 8bit computers as gateway drugs that invited people to become programmers. Currently the closest things we have is javascript+canvas, or some scripting languages in game modding scene.

Nobody[1] really writes assembler today proffesionaly anyway. It is too hairy now, and we have better compilers. Don't push it on kids.

[1] by nobody I mean almost nobody, and yes, arm assembler is better, but still show me a big application written in it