> Not that I can do anything about it, my conclusion over nearly 4 decades is that we have failed to take advantage of the increasingly denser silicon to make higher level machines, in particular machines that recognise the difference an instruction and a data element.

That's basically the CISC concept (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_instruction_set_comput...) all over again. The problem still being: which instructions do you choose to implement in hardware and how do you make a compiler smart enough to recognize when to use them? Remember, CISC went out of style because all of those high level instruction weren't being used when processor manufacturers generated statistics on commonly used software.