We started with machine code.

Actual instructions to a computer. Zeros and ones. The machine did not care about human readability, developer experience, onboarding, documentation, architecture diagrams, or whether the person writing it had slept properly.

It was pure instruction.

Then we made the first abstraction layer.

Assembly language did not remove complexity, but it made the relationship between human intent and machine execution slightly less hostile. Instead of writing raw binary, we could use mnemonics.

Still close to the machine.

Still painful.

But easier.

Then came higher-level languages. FORTRAN, COBOL, C, Pascal, Java, Python, JavaScript, and the long chain of tools that followed.…