Eons ago as an embedded programmer I came to respect Forth. I encountered numerous situations where using Forth led to a much smaller footprint (size in particular) -- Why? For exactly the reasons that Chuck Moore espouses here; you are writing a purpose-built VM from the hardware up.

Even then I don't agree that portability/abstraction isn't important - it's got the potential to be an extremely reductionist position. Instead I'd argue it's incredibly expensive and should be treated as such.