I get your point, but to play Devil's Advocate: Assembly is about as simple as it gets. The venerable 6502 chip only had around 40 instructions. At one point it

I get your point, but to play Devil's Advocate: Assembly is about as simple as it gets. The venerable 6502 chip only had around 40 instructions. At one point it was the most popular programming language in the world (if you clump all the variants together). Every other programming language you can write just gets compiled down into more Assembly than you would have if you just wrote Assembly by hand, and it will probably be less efficient. Yet despite all of that, there are very clearly some big wins to be had by writing in those other languages.