Yes, but there is a line to be drawn somewhere. Filesystems are sufficiently advanced such that there’s no meaningful gains to be had from manually allocating C

Yes, but there is a line to be drawn somewhere. Filesystems are sufficiently advanced such that there’s no meaningful gains to be had from manually allocating CHS for data, and they provide housekeeping. C abstracts a lot of architecture-specific information away, but still requires that you understand a modicum of memory management; if you understand it (and cache line access) well, you can get even more performance. Python abstracts that away as well, and gives you a huge standard library to accomplish many common tasks with ease. You can quickly make a prototype in Python, but it won’t be as performant as C. You can spend time profiling it and moving computationally-heavy parts into C extensions (I do this for fun and learning), but you’ll likely spend more time and get worse results than if you just rewrote it. Docker is an abstraction over already-existing technology like cgroups. It provides an easy-to-understand model, and a common language. This is quite valuable, but it does allow one to not know about what it’s hiding, which is problematic when troubleshooting – for example, naïvely assuming that querying /proc in a container shows the CPU resources allocated to the container, rather than the host. That’s how I view abstractions. They can be incredibly useful, but they usually have trade-offs, and those should always be considered. Most importantly, you should at a minimum be aware of what you’re giving up by using them, even if you don’t fully understand it.