You make good points - if we're just talking about semantics, then yes C is the closest portable language to x86 or arm and is low-level in that sense. But on t

You make good points - if we're just talking about semantics, then yes C is the closest portable language to x86 or arm and is low-level in that sense. But on the other hand, semantics is not always the only important thing: performance is sometimes important also, and there these low-level details matter. The architecture does its best to hide them from the user, but the abstraction is very leaky. For example, when writing high-performance CPU-bound code it's usually important to keep in mind how wide cache lines are, but C doesn't expose this to the programmer in a natural way.