Depends on your definition of basic - can use it to mean "simple", but it's also used to describe something fundamental, irreducible or essential.

Yes, agreed. The play on words was amusing to me (odd sense of humor alert!) It seems there is a lot of ambiguity between the way you and the GP used the word.

Though, this topic got me thinking. Unless you are using speech to text, I think that how you interface with the computer is fundamental to the act of programming. I do not think that abstraction is essential to programming. Much to the chagrin of my abstraction-loving nature, consistent procedural code can be easy to read and follow. For higher-order OOP, an understanding of abstraction and encapsulation is very necessary.