"I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor. Rich is better" (originally said by Beatrice Kaufman) might apply here. I have programmed significant systems in assembler, Fortran, RPG, Cobol, C, C++, Smalltalk, Python, and Lisp.

The advantages of higher-level languages are unmistakable. There are stories of pairwise comparisons of each of the sequential pairs in this list. In higher-level languages, I found I was producing solutions at a pace unthinkable in lower-level languages.