The D programming language

Lisp (DSL):

map [I Arg]~>say."Args[$I] = '$Arg'" enum.Args

D:

foreach (i, arg; args) Stdout("args[")(i)("] = '")(arg)("'").newline();

any question?

The advantage the bit-twiddling languages like C, C++, and now Go, provide is the ability for the programmer to apply optimizations by hand. This is an advantage to a language designer- all that tedious optimization work can be skipped (notice how proud the Go designers are of compile time- optimizations take time for the compiler to apply). Hand applying optimizations is also an advantage in micro-benchmarks (like the Shootout), and in blog posts and similar. Places where the code size is small enough that the cost, especially in terms of lost abstraction, is negligible.