> Who thinks in terms of CPU registers these days, for instance?
The people for whom it makes sense, same as the people who think about RTCs or deep sleep modes or programming single-board computers to read temperature sensors.
It isn't like the low level has gone away or become completely inaccessible. It's that now we have more options to write working code, and we can optimize for things beyond cycle-level and byte-level efficiency. Optimizing for readability, for example, wasn't really an option when all of the readable algorithms were unacceptably slow due to constant terms.
Breaking every rule about data-hiding to get somewhat better constant terms in the big-O analysis isn't virtuous, it's just what was forced on us by insufficient hardware.
"Who thinks in terms of CPU registers these days..."
That's pretty much the only way I think these days, but I guess assembly does not qualify as "modern language" even though it can and is used to control the lion's share of the world's "modern" computers. Matters little to me; I'm hooked.
I do not write in Lua, and I am sure I will be quickly corrected by someone who does, but isn't it considered both (virtual) "register-based" and "modern"? My sincerest apologies to the Lua experts if I am wrong.
This is my sentiment exactly. With all these fancy functional languages, non-imperative programming paradigms and heaps of JavaScript frameworks, there's one thing that one might forget: computers are made of silicon, not category theory.
It is easy to write down a bunch of assembly instructions. It's hard to make them do the thing you want, and it is our desires and our intent that need more than a little silicon to express.
Who thinks in terms of CPU registers these days, for instance?