My feeling is that this notion that each level of abstraction makes 'everything above that level easier, including sophisticated algorithms that would be 2 or 3

My feeling is that this notion that each level of abstraction makes 'everything above that level easier, including sophisticated algorithms that would be 2 or 3 levels up' is simply not true. Just because easy things are easier in a language with map/reduce and gc and whatever else, doesn't necessarily mean that things that were hard before will fit cleanly into the mechanism. Your idea that things that are 'completely unthinkable to maintain in Fortran or C' are somehow much easier in this kind of environment is just silly; there are multiple orders of magnitude more parallel code written in both of those languages than map/reduce and many of the classic parallel algorithms and (wince) design patterns like parallel prefix were written in these languages originally or are easily expressed that way. The _hard_ algorithms are ones with sophisticated communication requirements that aren't well captured by map/reduce, so in this case, having a abstraction to deal with the easy cases has accomplished nothing towards making hard cases easier. I'm not against abstraction, of course - just this premature triumphalism that picking a 'easy things become easy' approach gets you, especially if you don't solve the hard things.