Top-Down vs Bottom-Up

All languages can be conclusively and reliably separated into 2 major camps, those which were designed top-down and those which were implemented bottom-up.
The top down approach(example:LISP,Prolog,Haskell,Java,.NET) is creating an abstract environment and implementing a layer which translates abstractions into machine code or bytecode.
The bottom-up approach(example:Macro Assembler,Forth,C) is creating a execution chain of blocks which represent machine opcodes, with those blocks being portable abstraction of assembler.
What is your preferred approach?

Top-Down and Bottom-Up don't mean what you think they mean OP.
They're design methodologies and can be used with any language whatsoever.