I didn't read it as outer good, inner bad. In the C/machine code case, C builds a set of abstractions on top of the unabstracted machine code. If you write some

I didn't read it as outer good, inner bad. In the C/machine code case, C builds a set of abstractions on top of the unabstracted machine code. If you write some language in C that emulates the original machine code, then you have the problem stated in the article; you're writing an abstraction which undoes the work of a previous abstraction. This is what's bad and why you should go back to the outer platform.