I am really surprised that such a bad take has gotten so much airtime, almost as much as that such a gifted developer came up with it. The only way that the ti

I am really surprised that such a bad take has gotten so much airtime, almost as much as that such a gifted developer came up with it. The only way that the title is true is one that is not mentioned in the article: when C became popular, anything that was not assembly was a "high level language". Heck, even some Macro assemblers were considered high level, IIRC. The factors that are mentioned in the article fall roughly into two categories: 1. The machine now works differently. This may be true, but it does so almost entirely invisibly, and the exact same arguments given in the article apply in the same way not just to assembly language, but even to raw machine language. I have a hard time seeing how machine level is not low level. But I guess opinions can differ. What seems inarguable is that machine language is the lowest level available. And if the lowest available level does not qualify as "low" in your taxonomy, then maybe you need to rethink your taxonomy. 2. C compilers do crazy shit now This is also true, but it is true exactly because C is a low level language. As a low-level language, it ties execution semantics to the hardware, resulting in lots of undefined (and implementation defined) behavior that makes a lot of optimisations that some people really, really want to do (but which are far less useful than they claim) really really hard. So C compiler engineers have defined a new language C' which has semantics that are much more amenable to optimisation. Nowadays they try to infer that language C' from the C source code and then optimize that program. And manhandle the C standard, which is intentionally somewhat loose, in order to make the C'' language that looks like C but maps to C' the official C language. Since they were moderately successful, it can now be argued that C has morphed or been turned into a language that is no longer low level. However, the shenanigans that were and continue to be necessary to accomplish this make it pretty obvious that it is not the case that this "is" C. Because, once again, those shenanigans were only necessary because C is a low level language that isn't really suited to these kinds of optimisations. Oh, and of course the rationale document(s) for the original ANSI C standard, which explicitly state that C should be suitable as a "portable assembly language". But then again we already established that assembly is no longer a low level language...so whatever.