passive_fist comments on Open thread, Nov. 23 - Nov. 29, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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That the implementation of python is fairly slow is a different matter, and high-level languages need not be any slower than, say, C or Fortran, as modern JIT languages demonstrate. It just takes a lot of work to make them fast.
Lisp was also designed during that same period and probably proves your point even better. But 1960's Lisp was as bare-bones as it was high-level; you still had to wrote almost everything yourself from scratch.
Computerized math is the same today. No one wants to write everything they need from scratch, unless they're working in a genuinely self-contained (i.e. 'synthetic') subfield where the prereqs are inherently manageable. See programming languages (with their POPLmark challenge) and homotopy-type-theory as examples of such where computerization is indeed making quick progress.
Umm... LISP is elegant and expressive -- you can (and people routinely do) construct complicated environments including DSLs on top of it. But that doesn't make it high-level -- it only makes it a good base for high-level things.
But if you use "high-level" to mean "abstracted away from the hardware" then yes, it was, but that doesn't have much to do with "writing out your thoughts".