My personal opinion of this is that you can have high and low level code written in the same language at the expense of requiring more skill from the programmer

My personal opinion of this is that you can have high and low level code written in the same language at the expense of requiring more skill from the programmer. You can write a pure-functional RPN calculator in a handful of lines of D, you can also write D's entire implementation in D including the "low-level" aspects. I also think the distinction between low and high level code in languages that are not built around some theoretically abstract model of execution (e.g. the lambda calculus) to be rather pointless and mostly useful only for making poor arguments. I'm also sceptical of simplicity as an unqualified idea. I have read "simple" code with no abstractions that makes it extremely hard to read, I have read "simple" code that can be considered as such because the abstractions are actually abstractions: "Abstraction is the removal of irrelevant detail".