It's interesting trying to watch a non-programmer try to learn a language like C, C++ or Java and try to figure out the reason for all the boiler plate code to get something simple done. They ask questions like: Why does printing "hello, world" require more code than "print 'hello, world'"?
i once let a friend use my TI-89 for a couple of minutes. he wanted to program a game for it. when i checked to see what he had written so far, it said "there is a ball"
although hilarious, it's an ideal that shouldn't be laughed at
See? At first you just want a simple language to give instructions to the computer, so you can worry about learning how to come up with the algorithms that you need to translate.
A thesis that we want the machines to understand our high-level vision of an algorithm existed long before computers were invented. However, we failed to create such a system that would interpret our vision of a program ("there is a ball") and execute it appropriately. Wish you good luck in inventing such a system.
The reality is, programmers who don't understand how computers work can write ridiculously bad code. I saw it a lot. Efficiency does become an issue when a program is so bad and slow and unreliable that a computer can't execute it in a reasonably useful way.
I'd never hire a Python programmer who doesn't know what dynamic array is all about or what CPUs are dealing with when they run a program -- essentially addresses and numbers.
A recent YCnews post comes to mind: if you want to find a good PHP programmer you have to announce a C++ vacancy with no single word about PHP.
I'd take a C++ expert who also knew language X over somebody who just knew language X any day of the week. Being able to do something hard without shooting your foot off and understanding how the bits and bytes work make you better no matter what language you're using.
