> It was too high-level for his taste.
That's a pretty silly claim. Is Haskell not high-level?
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/OtherDocs/Hask...
Someone happy to see Haskell used in freshman CS education is not someone who opposes high-level languages.
Very interesting flip! For much of his life, Dijkstra opposed functional programming. He even more strongly criticised FP from Backus and APL from Iverson, which are both very funcional/function-level.
As he said, Java is a mess and any sensible person would oppose the switch from Haskell to Java. I am almost sure he never used any of them. Might have read about them, but highly doubt he run any on computer.
As for the high-level status of Haskell and APL — both languages are very mathematical. Haskell goes very into the abstract realm of computation, while APL tackles very raw form of computation. Semantically, Haskell is way more high-level. In terms of economy of notation and unified concepts, APL has no match.