I think many people fully understand this. When people rave about, say, haskell being nearly as fast as C, what they mean is that you can write much higher leve

I think many people fully understand this. When people rave about, say, haskell being nearly as fast as C, what they mean is that you can write much higher level, and thus shorter and more concise, code in a way that can be automatically optimized by the compiler quickly. In other words, he's correct but also assuming incorrectly that because other don't spell it out, they don't know.