In message , at 15:31:47 on Thu, 26 Nov
2015, Basil Jet remarked:

There's a whole spectrum of different complexities of programming, but
the closer you get to the metal the more you need to understand the
engineering function you are trying to provide.

Metal, of course, being a baffling jargon term for silicon.

It's far broader than that. For example if you are writing the software
to operate the hammers in a lineprinter you are literally bashing the
metal (rather than throwing a stream of ASCII at a port number for
someone else's software to turn into marks on the paper).
--
Roland Perry