"Low-level" is a word with multiple meanings. The original one is the one the article uses: low-level languages are non-portable and tied to the hardware on wh

"Low-level" is a word with multiple meanings. The original one is the one the article uses: low-level languages are non-portable and tied to the hardware on which they run, and high-level languages can target multiple platforms. Under this definition, C is absolutely a high-level language. My complaint would not exactly be that the author is playing semantic games; it would be that they are clinging to archaic terminology in a way that does more to confuse than enlighten. The "generations" taxonomy is generally more descriptive. 1st: Machine 2nd: Assembly 3rd: General-purpose 4th: Application-specific The 3rd/4th distinction gets a bit muddied sometimes, and back in the 80s and 90s people talked about a 5th generation that never really took off. But a couple (I think) clear examples of 4GLs are SQL, HyperCard, and Mathematica. What I like about that approach is that it mostly breaks languages up according to fairly clear distinctions about when you would use them. And then we can use "high/low-level" as a relative term, where higher-level languages tend to do more to abstract away the details of what the computer is actually doing. That does mean that higher-generation languages tend to be higher-level; all we lose in doing it that way is the ability to have silly arguments about where to place a completely arbitrary (and, frankly, useless) dividing line. I also like that this way we can recognize .NET IL, WebAssembly, and Java bytecode as very high-level 2nd generation languages, which, at the very least, is fun. Oh, and Forth is a 3rd generation language. Fight me, Chuck.