There's a slight variation on this, although I never saw it said out loud: Low level or not, system programming is about interacting parts. Long ago, low level

There's a slight variation on this, although I never saw it said out loud: Low level or not, system programming is about interacting parts. Long ago, low level meant sending messages/signals to various chips to have the desired effect. It was cryptic and full of time and space constraints, and people equate system with these complex topics but to me the "interacting parts of a system" is still an important aspect of the definition. That's why I accepted go being a system language, it just wasn't operating at the electronic layer, but the computer/node level.. but it was meant to orchestrate messages concurrently between all these nodes, just like chips and signals long ago.