[p1necone]

I think the point that the comment you're replying to is trying to make is not that big complicated software engineering can be done in say, C with similar levels of productivity to say, Java.

He's instead saying that it's very much possible to build a language with a similar level of abstraction/ergonomics to say, Java, or Python, or C#, or whatever but with similar performance characteristics to a lower level language like C. And we are starting to see this - there are languages like Rust or D which are (at least to my eyes) much less arduous and foot-gun prone than languages like C or C++ while having similar (or better) performance.

Of course there's also Jai, but I think we should remain unbiased here :P

As an aside though - I think some of those orders of magnitude of performance gains could be had by just writing better code in your existing high level languages. (At least in my experience with enterprise software dev).