@patrick I'm routinely torn by such discussions, because I'm too obsessed about performance.
On the one hand, I like the idea of high-level languages exposing capabilities that are otherwise unnatural at the assembly level because of limited CPU capabilities.
On the other hand, I am horrified by the overhead that those high-level constructs imply.
What might act as a tie-breaker could be the possibility of squeezing an interpreter into time-constrained routines, such as on the Atari 2600.