No thanks! The compilers were extremely slow. If you wanted to hang around all day waiting for your stuff to compile then that was fine but it wasn't a solution for most of us. Plus the majority of the market was 8-bit machines.

In the early 80s I wrote a lot of code in (BBC) BASIC and assembly. That was extremely fast to build and run, with optimisations where necessary. For example to use a CP/M machine at the time with turbo pascal, it'd take at least 10 minutes to get the machine up and compile something simple. On the BBC Micro at the time, my preferred machine, there would be working code in under a minute. That was a big gain. They were used for test automation at the time over HP-IB (IEEE-488), eventually replaced with PCs running 16-bit Visual Basic on Windows.