Could you please elaborate? Deep down everything is machine code anyway; the farther we get from that, the less and less "real" our concepts are. Closures, mona

Could you please elaborate? Deep down everything is machine code anyway; the farther we get from that, the less and less "real" our concepts are. Closures, monads, or lenses (I still have no idea what the latter two are) -- they feel kind of powerful but they're really only rearrangements of the same plain old data structures plus some implied pattern of their usage. Do you feel they're necessary for quality? What is your definition of quality? At the very least these concepts are less efficient, which lowers quality in the efficiency dimension. For example, in assembly it's very easy to detect integer overflow; in C, which is still fairly low-level, there's no direct way to do this and people invented various workarounds. They are less efficient, but portable. Does this raise the quality as you understand it? (BTW, there were a few attempts to write an OS in assembly (Menuet, Kolibri), now they seem to be mostly abandoned, but the intermediate results were fairly impressive: getting from boot to GUI in less than 10 seconds is something modern "big" OSes are utterly incapable of. This definitely looks like quality at least in some dimension.) edit: typos.