Expressiveness has many dimensions. It depends on what you are trying to express in the first place. C++ or Rust are expressive in both directions, towards the

Expressiveness has many dimensions. It depends on what you are trying to express in the first place. C++ or Rust are expressive in both directions, towards the metal and upwards in terms of abstractions. But those languages are not easy to reason about. They come with lots of stuff, hard to grok abstractions, ceremony and so on. Small languages like Scheme or Lua are expressive in that they don't force you to write a lot of stuff to get the job done. But those languages don't typically let you express what the computer should actually do at a lower level. C or Zigs let you do those things and are also relatively small languages. But their facilities for abstraction are limited and they force you to express more computational details. Go frees memory and schedules goroutines for you, but lets you express a lot more about how you lay out memory than other managed languages, so you can actually think in terms of bits and bytes. It has a great std lib so you can get stuff going quickly and reliably.