the idea of a credit card sized board, running open sourced code, to connect with peripherals is fantastic. but this project is going to disappoint. the guy works for broadcom which is how he got the smaller than minimum quantity of chips, so don't expect it to be repeated by anyone else. it's aim claims to be education, and people compare this to kit computers many years ago, but this is a far cry from that. this guy wants to steer you to use GNU/Linux and scripting languages like Python. no assembly programming. how can a kid learn about hardware without learning assembly? so much for education.
It's an ARM11 SoC running Linux, of course you can program in assembler. And ARM assembler is a very nice one to start with, many did due to Acorn's Archimedes home computer.
You can make that argument both ways - if you'd learned Fortran-77 and nothing newer, your knowledge would be obsolete as well.
Either way, you have the foundation, should you wish, to be able to bring it up to date without too much hassle.
I think you'd be surprised how simple an ARM actually is under the skin. Admittedly, it's not Z80-simple, but it's far, far removed from the x86/AMD64 monstrosities.
