[yason]

The things is, they were and they were not.

It's absolutely necessary that there's a line of people somewhere who will understand the path from garbage collection to assembly instructions. We can't build upon abstractions only as long as we still run stuff on physical cpus.

But it's also unequivocally true that once we have enough long-bearded oldtimers and newtimers who do understand how writing a Python expression somewhere will end up with a register write elsewhere all the others just don't — have to.

In old times, all you had was hardware and to program you had to understand hardware. But those who then did program and did understand were the few smart people who had access to hardware. Everyone else was left out. Now we have high-level languages, scripting languages, AI, what else. As long as we can maintain the link to hardware by some people, the rest can build on that.