Agreed. The distance between CS abstractions has widened to the point where the lower level abstractions are only relevant to the people who build them. There'

Agreed. The distance between CS abstractions has widened to the point where the lower level abstractions are only relevant to the people who build them. There's a close and obvious relationship between C statements and the PDP-11 instruction set. And at least one PDP-11 series processor was implemented with gate-level logic with no microcoding. So anyone with time to spare could copy that. It's not a trivial job, and it's probably more time than it's worth. But it's not unimaginably hard either. There's no obvious relationship at all between (say) Python and the gate-level internals of any mainstream modern CPU. There are at least four (five? six?) levels of abstractions between them. It's useful to build a generic gate-level processor to have some notional idea of what a computer is. And of course it's essential if you go into processor design. But µArch details are a graduate-level topic and not something most developers need to worry about.