>>1
>>4
You don't have to use asm! You could use BASIC, C, Free Pascal, FORTRAN, Perl or Lua instead. To get Free Pacal, Lua, etc. you need to use the FDIMPLES/FDNPKG package manager. I the bonus CD also contains some software packages, too (if you don't want to use networking).
http://wiki.freedos.org/wiki/index.php/Releases/1.3/Packages