I think the post would be more clear if the author said "indirection" or "path length" (loosely: the number of primitive logical steps to complete an operation)

I think the post would be more clear if the author said "indirection" or "path length" (loosely: the number of primitive logical steps to complete an operation). The point is that, with many interpreted language compilers, you doubly lose out: the primitive logical steps (in the author's example, function calls) are slower, and they aren't optimized away like they are in C. I think that's a valid point, because it limits code reuse. As you build up vast libraries and frameworks, the trivial indirections build up and it slows everything to a crawl.