I'm mostly interested in emerging and active fields in CS:AI and as result I tend to favor prototyping languages. I barely know C, I know even less C++ and the only ASM I did was some basic arithmetic with MIPS.
Is it safe for me to concentrate on high level languages? Realistically I will be using high level languages 99% of the time, however I'm afraid of that rare time where I will come in need of rewriting my stuff in a language at a lower abstraction level. How does /prog/ manage this balance?
Just get good with data structures in general, and at the very least become "comfortable" with C. That's as low as you'll need to go.
ASM is for interfacing with hardware (in the sense of writing drivers), OS-level programming, and very complex low level mathematical optimizations, like writing crypto or bignum libraries. You would be the one using those packages, not the one ]b]writing[/b] them.
C is the lengua franca for APIs. If you have to write a wrapper around a library, you are usually going to have to know about C as you have to set a pointer or a struct field.
To understand C you have to understand a little about assembly, just the basic concepts. I can teach you asm in 5 minutes, in fact I can teach you enough asm you need to know in this post.
asm lesson
-------------------------
You have 4 main registers in x86, we will call them the A, B, C and D registers. You can only do operations with values in the registers, not in memory. You can only work on two values at a time, the result gets put in the first value. All values in memory are pointers by default. Two add two values you first fetch them from memory and then add them, you put each instruction on one line:
move A , 1 ;you write a comment after every instruction
I forgot how to get values from memory so Im going to stop here