Levels of Abstraction and Alienation

In my first post for this class, I thought about how it must have felt psychologically for people to suddenly not be completely in control of their devices. Going from purely mechanical machines that could be disassembled and their secrets laid bare, digital machines must have felt strange and alien. The same thought struck me while I read the section about how the old guard fought against higher level languages, preferring to stay with the lowest levels for the sake of efficiency. I wonder if there wasn’t also some element of alienation they faced as programming moved towards the more abstract, losing touch with the connection to the hardware. I took the first two courses in the computer science department, cs61a and cs61b, and one of the programming projects that stands out distinctly was writing a basic compiler, moving from one level of abstraction to another. While I was considering taking cs61c and moving further down in the abstraction hierarchy, what appealed to me was understanding those murky levels between the high level programming I had been doing and the basics of ones and zeros and logic gates I was somewhat familiar with. It must have felt strange going in reverse, for those original programmers to see their field going in the opposite direction - away from the “real” programming they knew and off into unknown territory. I might be reading too much into that section, but since our class is about the culture surrounding these transitions, I hoped we could focus a bit more on the human element as well.