That is wishful thinking. Every layer we added between humans and the machines (and even the ones in the machines themselves) take hordes of dedicated humans to maintain: IDEs, compilers/interpreters, linters, CI tools, assemblers, linkers, operating systems, firmware, microcode, circuitry, circuit elements (manufacturing processes).
Just about every time somebody on this site says “we developers”, you can assume they’re ignoring the (large majority of) developers that don’t work on the same things they do, in the same way.
Yes, all those ever-growing layers of intricate abstraction that you take for granted and “don’t have to worry about” are conceived of, designed, built, and maintained by developers. Who do you think wrote the compiler for that syntax you don’t want to learn?
The point of abstraction is that it doesn’t leak. Most developers don’t need to understand compiler theory or assembly to be productive.
No one in my company writes assembly. very few developers work at that level of abstraction - this means those who made the compilers are doing a good job.
Yes, and very few people working on compilers do OS kernels, and very few people working on databases do compilers, etc. etc. My point is, they're all developers, so when you say "we developers", you'd better be speaking for all of them.
I agree with you. But not many people work with or understand the abstraction at OS or circuitry level.
That’s kind of my point: most people will work on higher abstractions but there will be some who maintain lower ones.
I write C# but I barely care about memory, gc nor microcontrollers nor assembly. Vast majority of people work on higher abstractions.
I would challenge that it is really a vast majority working at these highest levels of abstractions. There are thousands of people working on C#, Java and JavaScript runtimes and basic libraries. There are thousands of people working on compilers and thousands more (morw likely tens of thousands) working on operating systems and drivers etc... I think that the amount of effort that goes into all of this is severely underestimated because it so far removed from the perspective of a high level application developer.