I agree it's a bit smug, but I can see an argument why something like that (not familiar with Objective-S itself in anyway) might be considered more general pur

I agree it's a bit smug, but I can see an argument why something like that (not familiar with Objective-S itself in anyway) might be considered more general purpose—though it's a bit of a stretch still imo: To start, I think DSLs for algorithms is a bit off; it's more like DSLs for manual memory management. But I think the significant thing is that those languages are closer to a natural way of speaking about the "execution environment" of a computer vs that of human thought, which is essentially the gap or spectrum which programming languages attempt to span. And it makes a certain kind of sense to talk about generality of languages in terms of the set of human thoughts which they are effectively applicable to realizing. But this is very much against intuition when speaking of the generality of abstract structures since there are common, specific meanings in connection within them, and in computing that's typically what's meant. But, if you do look at it in the other sense, something higher level is going to have higher generality than something lower level. Just playing devil's advocate 'cause I was curious where they might be coming from with it (because it sounds like such nonsense at first).