[joel_ms]

>That is a naive fallacy

No, I'm not claiming an essential difference, merly that they are optimized for different things.

>There is no such thing in existence.

Of course there is, machine code is designed for computers, higher level languges are designed for humans.

>Popularity and lack thereof isn't trivially driven by cosmetics.

I'm not talking about what drives popularity, but what drives cosmetics.

[kazinator]

Machine and assembly languages are just another example of input that is easy to parse for human and machine.

(Machine programs are hard to understand, but in this area we don't have an easy human to machine comparison: machines generally don't understand programs. The advantage of machine language is that it doesn't have to be understood in order to be efficiently executed.)