Hmm at my university (Ball State), Computer Science was very little programing and was mostly theory. We did have to learn enough assembly and machine language to be able to write a complete C++ complier our final project. Hmm... that was actually learning machine language mainly... had to first change the machine language to assembler, then change that to C++. Man, that took me forever to do. I still have it on a Zip disk somewhere (but I no longer have any Zip drives). But anyway it was on us to learn all the code—classes didn't help out in the details. Mostly theory and math. Ugh...all the math. Sounds like you actually got more exposure to programming languages than I did. Nice!
Looks like you have a great setup at work! Wow!! Meanwhile I am working on a tiny little 13" laptop. I'd love to get me four screens!
Edit: No, I'm thinking backwards, aren't I? Sorry, it's late here and my mind isn't working. We changed the code to assembler and then to machine language. I had pages and pages and pages of printouts for all the machine language instructions.
I hated Assembly. It was one of the few college courses I got a C in. I did not enjoy it at all. The only thing I was good at was hash tables in C++. Those came pretty naturally to me.
I think I didn't mind so much because my first programming language when I was about 7 was BASIC on my Commodore 64 (and the tandy's at school. I think we have one Apple ][ as well). So BASIC trained me to be ok with that same kind of format that Assembly used... That said, high level languages like C++ were so much nicer!
I did a lot of BASIC stuff on our Texas Instruments computer that we had. We had an audio tape drive so we could save the programs and load them back up without having to write them all over again. I remember my dad subscribed to a magazine that had different programs in it each month.
I loved those magazines when I was a kid. I spent hours typing those programs in!