More and more layers of abstraction have since come to separate human programmers from the nitty-gritty of physical chips. And each one has taken a further step in the direction Grace Hopper realized made sense: freeing up programmer brainpower to think about concepts and algorithms, not switches and wires. Hopper had her own views of why colleagues resisted it, at first—and it wasn’t because they cared about making programs run more quickly. No, they enjoyed the prestige of being the only ones who could communicate with the godlike computer on behalf of the mere mortal who’d just purchased it. The “high priests,” Hopper called them. Hopper thought anyone should be able to program. Now anyone can. And computers are far more useful because of it.

– Tim Harford, Fifty Inventions That Shaped the Modern Economy, ch. “The Compiler”