Digging in the kernel dust

It's worse than that. Programming, apart from being a gigantic mess with multiple entire industries dedicated to dealing with how bad it is, is an abstraction we use to cope with the madness of digital electronics. Which is an abstraction over the horrors of analogue electronics at nanometre scale… and _that's_ also a lie the signals engineers comfort themselves with in order to avoid thinking about quantum physics. All systems are large.