A fine essay, except that it ignores that the "workaday" programmer actually hates high degrees of abstraction and ignores it. No, seriously. We're taught in

A fine essay, except that it ignores that the "workaday" programmer actually hates high degrees of abstraction and ignores it. No, seriously. We're taught in mainstream programming languages to temper our desire for abstraction with mechanical sympathy; being careful not to build too high a tower of abstraction lest our CPU god grows angry and knocks us down to earth with miserable runspeeds. Even if your algorithm is right, failing to fit in cache or having too many memory fetches can increase your code runtime by multiple orders of magnitude from where an optimal, machine-aware piece of code should be. And the languages that do try to bring more abstraction to the table are ironically dismissed as "too academic" or "too strange" or "not practical" by most people in the industry.