While these are all true and very nice, you've missed the fundamental one; the entire raison d'etre of all high-level language is to optimise Programmer productivity.

In the early days, this was very much at the expense of run-time efficiency (speed, size, etc) - and this is the root of many of the "you've got to use Assembler if you need fast, compact code" arguments.

The fact is, with modern high-performance, low-cost hardware, the need for ultimate runtime efficiency is greatly diminished, and modern optimising compilers do a very good job; the cost & availability of Good programmers, on the other hand, is an entirely different matter...