Very recently computers got to the point where we can afford to write slow code, this is the reason higher level people are coming out of the woodwork.
Yeah, everything pretty much fell apart in 1958 with that stinking mccarthy. Since then trying to write any performant code meant dealing with an innane chatter of closures and inheritance and parametric polymorphism. Maybe, if we're lucky, computers will get slow again and performance will matter.
Coincidentally, I spoke at length with a grad student software developer for the RoboCup challenge in which autonomous robots compete. In this particular league, Nao robots are supplied to each team as the standard, making the performance emphasis on software that runs in the robot.
So I asked the developer, does he use the famous ROS software for running the robot. He said, no way, because the robot had only an onboard Intel Atom of relatively low performance, all the complex multi-threaded behavior had to be written in low-level C. No space nor execution time for anything more.
I'll bet you a nickel that grad student didn't learn about complex multi threaded behavior in low level C. His challenge was to take a high level concept and express it in a resource constrained environment.
Of course there is a need for freestanding C. But for every one of him there are a hundred developers using c++ or java or javascript. They may not appreciate the power of working in such high level languages, but the vast majority of developers work in HLLs.
Very recently computers got to the point where we can afford to write slow code, this is the reason higher level people are coming out of the woodwork.