I believe that if you're looking for performance, you're never going to be able to avoid understanding how the programming language constructs are translated in

I believe that if you're looking for performance, you're never going to be able to avoid understanding how the programming language constructs are translated into actual machine instructions. However, it is clearly less important these days to optimise code on that level, so as long as your runtime performs well enough, the benefit of having a simpler way to describe the solution is worth it. Many would probably take issue with the statement above, but the popularity of Python, which is possibly the most slowest popular language that has ever been constructed, suggests that programmer efficiency is much more important to most people than performance.