I knew a guy who did 6510 and 68000 assembler for many years and had a hard time using higher order languages as well as DSLs. “Only assembler is real code. Everything else is phony, bloat for what can be done way better with a fraction of the C++ memory footprint.”

Well that guy was me and while I still consider HOLs as weird abstractions, they are immensely useful and necessary as well as the best option for the time being.

SQL is the classic example for so called declarative languages. To this day I am puzzled that people consider SQL declarative - for me it is exactly the opposite.

And the rise of LLMs proof my point.

So the moral of the story is, that programming is always about abstractions and that there have been people, who refused to adopt some languages due to a different reference.

The irony is, that I will also miss C like HOLs but Prompt Engineering is not English language but an artificial system that uses English words.

Abstractions build on top of abstractions. For you code is HOL, I still see a compiler that gives you machine code.