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To me programming is low level languages. That’s where the work gets done. Not a bunch of acronyms, Interfaces, or API’s whatever you want to call it.

I’ve tried a lot of high level “Tools” in the last 35 years and they always came up short. You needed to add some real code in here and there. On a simple level like adding a little VBA to an Excel Spreadsheet.

I was recruited into a project that was providing lots of new UNIX kernel support to a HP-UX 7.0 environment on a 68030 CPU. I had to port Mentat System V Streams, an HP-UX 9.0 multi-LUN SCSI driver (backport by me to 7.0), X.25 Level 2 and 3 support code from Spyder and cobble up a tunnel driver to hook the new Mentat Streams into the BSD TCP/IP stack. Over 6 weeks I ported and integrated 275,000 lines of new code into the kernel. At the lowest level, I needed to use 68030 assembler to leverage memory "test and set" instructions to ensure atomic locking of data structures.

When I finished the task, my company took the new OS to a computer show in Europe to show it off, then a week later an earthquake hit Haiti. My code was in the field providing support for military activity to support the rescue/recovery efforts. No AI in those days. Just hours of grunt work making that kernel code bullet proof. The "magic" under the covers that lets people to the high level stuff with ease.

To me programming is low level languages. That’s where the work gets done.

Me too. I do the very largest portion of my work in C, with an occasional dip into assembler. I have been working fully loaded since 1968. In the first 15 years of my career assemble was most heavily used with FORTRAN taking up some slack. C became available in 1980; and, that was really nice. I am an Embedded programmer, with the very rare add-on skill of being able to design the circuit boards. Instrumentation and control is the silo in which I live.