I remember working on an ETL pipeline in Airflow years ago and thinking: "we're defining and programming an abstract computer". I guess with general computers

I remember working on an ETL pipeline in Airflow years ago and thinking: "we're defining and programming an abstract computer". I guess with general computers everything we do is basically defining nested specific computers. That's, I think, the insight behind SmallTalk and the original concept of objects it used: the objects were supposed to represent computers and the message passing was an abstract network layer.