One could argue that all software is operating hardware. In many cases the hardware you're operating is a CPU, GPU, memory and storage. Most of the time it do

One could argue that all software is operating hardware. In many cases the hardware you're operating is a CPU, GPU, memory and storage. Most of the time it doesn't feel like that if you're doing something like web programming. But for something like computer graphics, where you're thinking carefully about how to lay out memory so that a multi-core CPU can traverse it in the most efficient way, functional programming feels similarly lacking as you're describing in the robotics case. In my experience after "looking behind the curtain" for this kind of task where performance and low-level control is absolutely necessary, it's difficult to ignore all the inefficiencies which must exist in a more abstract system. But I'm not sure that's entirely justified.