[cmsonger]

The author is playing a semantic game.

I don't think the author's point is that "C is not a good language for systems programming." You are not going to have an equivalent to volatile int *dma_register = SCATTER_GATHER_BASE; in Haskell.

The author's point is that the drive to make C and other "model the von Neumann machine" languages execute quickly has made the compiler very complicated (the author is implying that "low level requires simple compiler") and that processors built to make such code run quickly are also very complicated. And those complications carry costs.

In many ways this is a "call to programming model action" and cites GPU as illustrating the potential when "new programming model" and "silicon to support it" are done in concert.