Is there such a thing as "interactive nonfiction"? Because if not, there should be. Design educational websites this way and watch children learn.
The real physical Universe is interactive nonfiction.
The real physical universe is nothing but tooling for playing with advanced math (but it's not always easy to figure out what the advanced math is, or how best to play with it).
And not just the learning purposes. Imagine the possibilities if we could properly simulate (and speed up the simulation) the world - what if we could use genetic algorithms to develop an organism.
These two statements are quite different. Higher level programming languages than assembly are unnecessary; anything beyond the lambda calculus is unnecessary (assuming our goal is to compute Turing computable things). That's very different from saying that they're useless; just because they can be done without doesn't mean that they should.