I see this explicitly argument being made more and more recently. A language is better because it’s more explicit and hence easier for people to understand. I think it’s completely wrong. If you want to be really explicit, use assembler. But everyone would argue that this is too explicit and harder to understand. So definitely explicitly in itself in a language is not intrinsically better.

What I think this whole argument is about is levels of abstraction. By saying language A is more explicit then B and hence easier to understand, what he really means is that language A is on exactly that level of abstraction that makes most sense to him. It might even mean that it makes most sense to most developers and he does mention the bell curve, but I think that discussion is still out.

Personally I would argue that Scala, Rust, D and at the very extreme Scala are not too high level, it’s just that most developers nowadays learned programming in something like C, Java (pre 8) or C++ (pre 11) and hence are used to that level of abstraction that feels natural to them. I’m confident though that a next generation, learning early on more functional constructs that are more and more pervasive in newer languages and also newer version of “old” languages (Java, C++) will feel natural to them and the “right” level of abstraction.