Not "pushing on you". Just very interested in this question.
So this is about performance? But that is a separate issue. The claims in the OP are that a language can be "too powerful" because programs written in it, although shorter, are too hard to understand. I'm looking for evidence of this that doesn't simply reduce to "intuitive is just what you've seen before". The interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be any.
(Performance is a separate issue because it has to do with the gap between abstractions and the machines they have to execute on. I think this may be the Achilles heel of the highly mathematical FP approaches. Still, it's a change of subject to interpret "too powerful" as "too powerful for the machine" rather than "too powerful for the brain".)
The underlying problem seems to be that abstraction is hard. That is, for any complex system, it's hard to come up with a set of concepts that can express the system with less overall complexity. This is true of programming in all languages. The problem is masked in lower-level languages because the abstractive weakness of the tool provides an excuse to produce the usual reams of code and thus the usual runaway complexity. But that doesn't mean the task is easy in a more powerful language. The hardest part -- coming up with a good set of concepts in the first place -- remains. Faced with that, people do sometimes rush to apply the technical devices offered by, say, a Lisp to a not-clear-enough set of concepts. The resulting programs can indeed be hard to understand. I've done it myself.
Performance is not a separate issue because as professional programmers we aren't selecting tools for anything other than their ability to help us get things done for our users. This isn't a question of "too powerful for the machine", it's a question of "too abstract an approach for a team of humans to efficiently understand the implications of the choices their members make".
In that sense, some abstractions are indeed too "powerful" for the problem and the people at hand. When training somebody to work the register at a corner store, one does not start by deriving number theory from Peano's axioms and then telling them to work it out from there. You make sure they understand basic arithmetic through simple practice and then you train them on the specific operations for money, mainly with further practice. For the novice cashier, "power" in the sense you use comes at too high a price with too low a payoff to be worth it.
By the way, what came across as pushy was you insisting I had a burden to justify something I had never said (and incidentally don't believe).
So this is about performance? But that is a separate issue. The claims in the OP are that a language can be "too powerful" because programs written in it, although shorter, are too hard to understand. I'm looking for evidence of this that doesn't simply reduce to "intuitive is just what you've seen before". The interesting thing is that there doesn't seem to be any.
(Performance is a separate issue because it has to do with the gap between abstractions and the machines they have to execute on. I think this may be the Achilles heel of the highly mathematical FP approaches. Still, it's a change of subject to interpret "too powerful" as "too powerful for the machine" rather than "too powerful for the brain".)
The underlying problem seems to be that abstraction is hard. That is, for any complex system, it's hard to come up with a set of concepts that can express the system with less overall complexity. This is true of programming in all languages. The problem is masked in lower-level languages because the abstractive weakness of the tool provides an excuse to produce the usual reams of code and thus the usual runaway complexity. But that doesn't mean the task is easy in a more powerful language. The hardest part -- coming up with a good set of concepts in the first place -- remains. Faced with that, people do sometimes rush to apply the technical devices offered by, say, a Lisp to a not-clear-enough set of concepts. The resulting programs can indeed be hard to understand. I've done it myself.