I trust that you do understand the concept of compilation right? It'd be terribly difficult and tedious to implement JavaScript, for instance, in x86 assembly (

I trust that you do understand the concept of compilation right? It'd be terribly difficult and tedious to implement JavaScript, for instance, in x86 assembly (but possible!), much like it would be to implement the things that David's logic programming and predicate dispatch in JavaScript directly. Having a language which supports syntactic abstraction allows you to hide away lots of the complexities and let the compiler generate them for you. It's no different than using C instead of x86, or Scheme to C to x86, or whatever other path to x86 you can think of.