Forgive me a side note, but has it not been shown for some time that
apart from a very gifted few people, hand-crafted machine-code is
usually slower than the best optimising compilers these days? With out
of order instruction stuff, side effects (inter-core locking) cache
coherency &c it isn't hard to wind up using "simpler" machine code
which performs worserer.
Doesn't really alter the language debate, but it does go to "compilers
are pretty smart these days"