I'm not sure the analogy between languages compiling to machine code is a particularly good one. High-level languages compile to machine code because it's extremely tricky to create or update hardware to support high-level languages, and machine code is especially ugly. Neither of these apply to anywhere near the same extent to CSS, which significantly reduces the advantages of added abstractions.
I'd also be way of calling Sass a "programming language". CSS preprocessor would be more accurate.