[kiwih]

I noted in a different comment in this thread that we teach all first-year compsci and software engineering students at my university MIPS assembly. They may then specialise into other areas, security, operating systems, embedded, etc., and in those specialties may need assembly for more modern CPUs.

We have found that when needed, students pick up the newer/more advanced assembly languages (e.g. ARM, x86) fairly well, so we believe the early and universal introduction to MIPS does provide benefits.