The German historian Oswald Spengler considered our age the age of abstraction. Nowhere is this more apparent than in programming, where abstraction isn’t just a conceptual convenience but an absolute necessity. Programmers like to talk about their tools (rather abstractly) as a “stack.” At the top of the stack—the surface most of us encounter first—are simple markup languages, HTML being the best known. At the bottom are the “bare metal” languages of the machine. Thus there is a hierarchy, and the further down in the stack you go, the less abstract—and, in a way, more difficult—programming gets.
It’s not really metal down there, of course. It’s sand—impossibly thin layers of
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