And what about humans? You are rarely writing code for computers, but for humans. Many companies optimize code for readability. And there is a reason. Usually multiple people are working on the same code at the same time, or over time at least. It is the compiler's job to translate the code to computers language which can be imperative, I would still prefer the human side functional and declarative. Maybe it is just me.
I have struggled with the concepts of Java for a long time, especially with the many keywords that I cannot relate to, private, final, static, void while I understood majority of Clojure at the first glance. I could not write Java without an IDE but more than happy to develop Clojure with VI. It appears to me that we overcomplicate things for no good reason and underestimate the power of simplicity.