Rewind your disappointed expectations back to Fortran II in the 1950's, the first Fortran with subprograms. The value proposition was this: if a programmer was willing to help the Fortran optimizer out by avoiding aliasing, the compiler would generate code that was usually fast enough to avoid the need to write in assembly. It was a great deal for the programmer at the time. Fortran succeeded not just because it allowed one to write more productively in a "high-level" language but because its compilers could optimize well enough that there was no significant performance cost to doing so. (And then its popularity allowed one to port Fortran code from one vendor's hardware to another.)