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Best way to learn programming:

1) Learn logic
2) Learn assembly
3) Learn C

At this point, two choices: stick with C or learn whatever high-level languages/paradigms suit what you want to do.

Almost everyone does the exact reverse.  First learn BASIC or Java, then attempt to understand what's going on underneath (and probably never get around to it).

If you go from the bottom up, each step gets easier and there's no mystery hiding what's going on under the hood.

>>18
In a real high-level language, you get 4294967296. It's just a number like any other; it has no special significance.
Right, because all computers have infinite memory and can represent any number, no matter how large.  And what about floating-point values?  They all have infinite precision and range at the same time, right?  No need to understand how a floating-point processor works!

I have no clue what you mean here. A "binding", "reference", or "handle"
A "handle" is usually a pointer to a pointer.  You would probably not use handles to build a linked list.

You are the poster boy for the OP argument.  It's probably fine in your case, but competent programmers can always do better than the built-in mechanisms in a high-level language.  It's not that language designers are incompetent, they just can't foresee what every individual programmer wants to do in their specific application.

From your description of high-level languages, you're completely unaware of just how inefficient your code actually is.  You expect your numeric values to always be some sort of "BigInt" class, apparently.  So your version of a + b is probably, realistically, about five function calls and maybe 50 to 100 lines of code, where it would be a single instruction for anyone who knows what they're doing.

You can call the difference between 50 lines of code (probably interpreted code, at that) and a single, native instruction "micro-optimization" if it makes you feel better.  But that's for doing a + b.  When, someday, you do need to write a large, complex application, you'll see things differently.