[unscaled]

Higher level does not necessarily mean more modern language features and paradigm - it only means language's computation model is farther removed from the actual hardware.

Allen was specifically discussing auto-optimizations (what we nowadays would just call 'compiler optimizations') and essentially argued that low level languages, in the quest of allowing fine-grained manual optimization, prevent many types of advanced auto-optimizations.

Specifically speaking, it is well known that FORTRAN still often beats C in numerical calculations just by the virtue of not supporting pointer aliasing (especially pointers pointing to arbitrary positions in the middle of an array which is being looped over).