[WorldMaker]

That's the central argument in the Church-Turing Theory isn't it? Church felt very strongly that the difference between his and his students' "elegance" and Turing's "practical" was a difference only in abstraction and that the two models were equivalent and translatable (you can write in one abstraction and convert it to the other).

That theory continues to bear fruit as the history of programming languages is almost entirely about bringing new and "better" abstractions to problems and then translating them to "dumber, more practical" machines. We have programming languages today modeled directly off the elegance of (though now sometimes still a few steps removed from being direct implementations of) the lambda calculus and mu-recursive functions, and the amazing thing is that they work great even given how "dumb" and "inelegant" our machines can be in practice.