Of course no one in their right mind writes code for complex Turing machines, but don't be confused by all the layers of abstractions. Programming at any level

Of course no one in their right mind writes code for complex Turing machines, but don't be confused by all the layers of abstractions. Programming at any level is fundamentally the same, it's about iteration, branching, composition of smaller pieces, and packaging smaller pieces into bigger ones. No matter at what level you write your code, it's always like this. The differences in API are not important. EDIT: I think that concurrency is a bit different in this respect. It really requires somewhat different prespective, but again it reduces to simple basic elements (like the agent model, or pi calculus) which are reiterated and reimplemented many times.