the small, low level things is where i like to work.
i also only work in a language that is small and simple for much the same reasons.
to me, reliability and low latency are the two most important things.
Discussion
How low is low for you?
mambo low...
unless it's bulk cpu/gpu bound processing latency should be in the nanoseconds above the lightspeed limit.
i suppose you also maybe were talking about hardware level? i'm of the opinion that everything should be as close to the metal as possible, while still allowing you to work at arbitrarily higher levels of abstraction.
some things don't need to be handled so closely, this is why i agree with the Go approach of memory management, and the way in Go that if you need to bypass this system it is simple to write your own schedulers and cache managers, again, when you need to, you can tickle the hardware, but most of the time you can work on the level of abstraction that is most efficient and suited for reasoning about the task.