But the leaky abstraction is useful in that it is a good thing to have some conception of how the machine works. There's a part of my brain that still thinks of

But the leaky abstraction is useful in that it is a good thing to have some conception of how the machine works. There's a part of my brain that still thinks of every system as an overgrown Apple ][+. It's not the case, of course, but things like pointers, memory allocation and the like made perfect sense to me because I had a sense of what was happening at the hardware level. The last assembly language I used was IBM's 370 assembly and I have only the vaguest knowledge of the machine code on the systems that I use today, but that 35-year-old knowledge is still helpful