> high level intent is just sugar I disagree with how your use of "just" here. It's common for programmers to dismiss the importance of syntax but syntax and n

> high level intent is just sugar I disagree with how your use of "just" here. It's common for programmers to dismiss the importance of syntax but syntax and notation are the interface and UX between the language semantics and your brain. It's no less important to get this right. There's a half-joke that Europe was able to rapidly advance in Calculus beyond Britain due to the superiority of Leibniz notation. > healthy respect for their base materials What's unique about computers is the theoretical guarantee that the base does not matter. Whether by lambda calculus, register machines or swarms of soldier crabs running from birds in specially designed enclosures, we're fine as long as we appropriately encode our instructions. > bunch of branches and loops You could also easily say it's just a bunch of state machines. We outsource tedious complexity and fine details to compiler abstractions. They track things for us that have analogues in logical deduction so that as long we follow their restrictions, we get a few guarantees. When say, writing asynchronous non-deterministic distributed programs, you'll need all the help you can get. Even designing close to the machine (which most programs will not need) by paying attention to cache use, memory layout, branch divergence or using SIMD remain within the realm of abstractions.