I would tell your friend that programming best occurs at the appropriate level of abstraction to succinctly express the problem at hand. For example, if you ar

I would tell your friend that programming best occurs at the appropriate level of abstraction to succinctly express the problem at hand. For example, if you are trying to write "business logic", you don't want to have to worry about allocating memory or ensuring data consistency. You just want to worry about business concerns. I suspect your friend has simply not tried any sufficiently difficult programming project. If your problem is non-trivial, you feel appropriately grateful for libraries that provide higher layers of abstraction.