This is great. I often miss the asm blocks of C, and think the benefits of mainly working in a higher level language and dropping down to a lower level language for performance reasons have been lost in current times (mobile apps - I’m looking at you). We've also been distracted by very hands-on approaches to composition like language binding and writing interfaces which require so much boilerplate when the interpreter could do the heavy lifting for us.

Don't lecture me about performance when computers today are on the order of 1000 times faster than when I learned programming, and when even non-JIT scripting languages are 100-200 times slower than native code, we still have an order of magnitude speedup over native apps of the 80s. IMHO all that matters today is developer time, which is being squandered by languages like Swift and Rust that encourage a trees over forest view of productivity. My favorite non-mainstream languages are HyperTalk (AppleScript, ActionScript) and MATLAB (Octave) which provide tremendous leverage in few lines of code. Or better yet, code-less functional environments like Excel or FileMaker where you only drop down to a macro language when necessary. Or even better that than, declarative environments like the web that were built with relational data models and markup before AJAX opened the floodgates to callback hell and all the workarounds since (why the web lost WYSIWYG editing is a profound tragedy to me).

This turned into a rant but I simply don’t think code is supposed to be the way it is today. We’ve made a mistake. Yes, it has advanced computer science remarkably. But the opportunity cost of that is that we spend our days writing boilerplate and dealing with nondeterministic distributed computing issues informally rather than working at an appropriate level of abstraction.