Comment by gsliepen

Early programming languages had to work with the limited hardware capabilities of the time in order to be efficient. Nowadays, we have so much processing power available that the compiler can optimize the code for you, so the language doesn't have to follow hardware capabilities anymore. So it's only logical that the current languages should work the limitations of the compilers. Perhaps one day those limitations will be gone as well for practical purposes, and it would be interesting to see what programming languages could be made then.