It would seem from the context of his statement the latter, especially given that he built C++
Do engineers know the ins and outs of concrete and rebar? Or do they offload that knowledge onto manufacturers? But programmers can't offload anything onto the language creator or they aren't real programmers.
I'm glad for all the work the SBCL and GHC teams put onto their languages so I can use their abstractions without needing to know the ins and outs of performance optimization. Maybe one day you'll find a language you like that allows you to focus more on your problem domain and less on its traps, idiossyncrasies and inadequacies.
Macho man! ... Maybe one day you'll find a language ...
Your tone is really shitty, and it's made worse by the fact that you're being shitty toward some imaginary strawman you've put in my place. For what it's worth: I greatly value good abstractions, I think appropriate high-level languages should be used whenever there's not a good reason to use low-level languages, I think leakier abstractions are shittier abstractions, I think C++ is full of the leakiest of abstractions, and I think Haskell and lisps are great. I know you're really eager to shit on others because you think you've achieved some kind of higher level consciousness, but you should probably work on your knee-jerk reactions.