I would disagree, it's all about time spent (one can argue wasted) It's a lot faster to "get", to understand well written code that uses natural language semantics regardless of the reader competency
If you're so far abstracted from hardware that none of this matters, well, OK, write what you want. But there is an awful lot of code that interacts with the hardware more directly than one might think, and even in higher level code there are often some significant gains to be had in terms of tweaking things for the branch predictors and such.
Though I guess if you're in an abstracted enough language, you can't even really influence that stuff. It's been years since I've written anything much beyond C (C++ with STL classes is a nice treat, but it mostly talks to something written in C over some data link or another).