It really depends on the language and what you are doing. The majority of of the field is closest to working with mathematical equations which makes sense as th

It really depends on the language and what you are doing. The majority of of the field is closest to working with mathematical equations which makes sense as the people who created the languages took ideas from mathematics when designing the language and did the hard work of transforming those ideas into something that could be ran on a computer. However, as you get closer to the hardware level, you move away from the abstract and need to think about the way the machine is built/configured and the actual instructions that will be executed. There are some languages, like C, that kind of bridge the divide between the two. Others, like Lisp, are almost entirely abstract with little need to think about how the instructions get ran at a lower level.