Of course, what counts as "low level" depends on your perspective. There are plenty of programmers today who don't spend much time working on data structures or fundamental algorithms (e.g., quicksort). Most commonly used languages have a decent sort routine in the standard library(or at least one that isn't horrible). Unless it's so slow that it forms a bottleneck, there's no reason to treat it as anything other than a black box. The same is true of data structures. Today's languages come equipped with tons of collection types (queues, vectors, hash tables, sets...), interfaces to SQL (and noSQL) databases and key-value stores, and so on. The days when all you had were arrays with integer indices are past.