You can certainly contrive a counter-example---even in 1986, you could say much the same thing about assembly and something like C or BASIC. But once that leap

You can certainly contrive a counter-example---even in 1986, you could say much the same thing about assembly and something like C or BASIC. But once that leap of abstraction was made, we seem to have hit a plateau of expressive power. Is the jump from C to Rust as empowering as the jump from assembly to C? I don't think it is.