That's a _bit_ extreme though. Let's start with C, the portable assembly language. Having said that, now that WebAssembly is on the cards (boo, hiss), we'll have many more of these from-the-ground-up affairs.
re: reddit thread: that Kragen, name is familiar...
That "C is portable assembly language" mantra bugs me a bit. There are lots of things that are dirt simple in real assembly language but impossible to do in (standard) C: tail call optimization, computed gotos, arithmetic overflow detection, SIMD, control over registers and local variable allocations, etc...
If you want to make things really low level, then make a compiler that targets assembly language and then bootstrap it. Coding the first version of the compiler in assembly or C instead of something more suitable for the task is just unnecessary pain.
I don't know how field-famous he is, but googling his name (he has a ML named after him) was full of fun crazy hacks idea. Like writing binaries under MS-DOS (just the few commands it provides like dir, copy etc) by using codepage keycodes `COPY CON > MY.COM`. And then expanding possibilities.
I agree it's a bit much to answer your question, but the spirit is there. And I agree, although learning lisp in lisp was very valuable on the intellectual level, the ignored primitives (cons, gc, interned symbols, IO) are worth knowing too. I found this book (warning: french) http://www.decitre.fr/livres/la-programmation-applicative-97... at a library, discussing a scheme system up until the io primitives. It was a great read. Sidenote: they called macros doubly-recursive functions :)
Also this was here not long ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9699065