> You have a “blue collar” layer where bytes and bits get shuffled around and hands get dirty and a “white collar” layer where programmers pretend the world is

> You have a “blue collar” layer where bytes and bits get shuffled around and hands get dirty and a “white collar” layer where programmers pretend the world is made of legos and there’s no need to get your hands dirty to write programs. Nope. The analogy you came up with is interesting, but although there is some overlap, it doesn't really capture the distinction and is the reason why you're not understanding the bit I wrote about connection languages and component languages. You can have a component language that is just as "white collar" as the connection language. And you can (probably) have a connection language that is quite blue collar, although that might be a bit harder. The reason I find your analogy interesting is that despite actually not capturing what is there, it does seem to capture how many people (erroneously) view and use the distinction between connection and component languages. Objective-C added Smalltalk as a connection language, a language for plugging together the Software ICs you would write in C. See, for example https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/01/swifter-sieving-of-primes-with-software.html https://blog.metaobject.com/2019/01/swifter-sieving-of-prime... It did not add Smalltalk as a "white collar" language that didn't need to get its hands dirty, and it didn't have the facilities to do that. Over time, people discovered that the connection language was in many ways more convenient to use, and so did what you describe, use it as a "higher level", more "white collar" language. But once again, that was an abuse of the language, it wasn't made for that and, due to not being made for it, it wasn't very good at it. Even after they added some facilities to make that use-case more possible.