Has anybody else learned from lower level up?

Over the last year or so I've been trying to learn programming, I was told Java was a good starting language so I started there.

Within a week or so I was able to write simple little programs to do mundane little things, but I felt lost and like I was just doing what the videos/books told me to do.

I've gotten this feeling a lot throughout my life, and the only way I can make it go away is by learning all the "whys", so then it occurred to me that I had very little knowledge about what actually goes on in a computer, on the hardware level when I turn it on.

So I spent the last 2 weeks crawling up from learning about the basics of electricity, to the first implementations of boolean logic through relays, and now assembly and I'm actually understanding what it is that I'm doing, and what is happening when I am typing lines of code.

When I speak with other programming buddies though, they only know high level languages, and little bits of C/C++. They also make a seemingly valid point that high-level languages like Java and Python where created to make it easier for people to learn to program. So I'm wondering has anybody else needed to learn in the way I did?