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I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now and the Thing I Loved Has Changed
(www.jamesdrandall.com)
this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2026
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Programming
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I gained a lot of understanding noodling with extreme low-level memory access etc, but in reality almost all the coding I ever did early on was in C with stdlib etc, which is shaped more by low-level realities of the CPU, but is still full of abstractions. Abstractions that were often opaque to us as well, because this was before Linux and ubiquitous open source.
Sure everything is a few more layers removed from the simple hardware these days, but once it's a black box, it's a black box. A lot of the feeling of being closer to the hardware is pretty meaningless.
Sure a variable in C is really just a way of referring to a piece of memory, while in Python it's some sort of data structure in a mapping most of us don't really know the exact nature of, but in the end the difference is rarely is of any significance and most of us only have a similarly vague idea of how the compiler works it out for us in C.