Comment by aw1621107

> The ability of a language to express detail and the ability of a language to have high abstractions are two different things, and when we talk about high and low level languages, I claim that what we intuitively mean is abstraction, not the expressivity of contracts.

I think you're right with respect to discussion about abstractions in the context of high-/low-level languages, but again, I feel like what GP was trying to get away from the high-/low-level framing in the first place and might have meant something different when they used the word "abstraction".

Perhaps this is me misinterpreting things, but I took GP's use of "abstraction" as something more along the lines of what it might mean in "this library's abstractions are designed poorly/well because they are easy/hard to misuse and/or understand". In that context I think "abstraction" is more about the precise interface contract and its quality - e.g., a poorly-chosen abstraction might not reflect the domain it ostensibly represents well because it permits actions/behaviors that don't make sense for that domain, and that in part might be due to a language being unable to express a more appropriate contract. I feel that better matches GP's high-/low-type-system-complexity axis.