The issue with abstracted languages is it's hard to make a quick mental model of what could be generated by looking at the code itself as you have to understand

The issue with abstracted languages is it's hard to make a quick mental model of what could be generated by looking at the code itself as you have to understand n levels of abstractions to understand time/space requirements (C somewhat suffers from this at the compiler level). Both abstracted and terse languages have upsides and downsides, one of which is expressiveness which in turn theoretically allows for more optimizations given a sufficiently smart compiler. I think an optimal language would allow writing optimizations from within the language itself which would make it abstracted _but_ to also allow functions to be types themselves if you will and hold required compiler enforced time/space requirements.