That's exactly the author's point. The C that programmers write is remarkably far from what the compiler generates for modern hardware. How do you propose mea

That's exactly the author's point. The C that programmers write is remarkably far from what the compiler generates for modern hardware. How do you propose measuring the number of abstractions? JavaScript has remarkably few built-in abstractions, but it's in no way "low-level" from a hardware perspective.