I think a little differently...
about the throw hardware approach. Before I go there, I am old enough to remember going with my dad to IBM Las Vegas where he worked. Key punches were pretty common, but my fathers job was a little different; he wrote the programs by hard wiring gates from discrete transistors.
My first grasp of the power of native machine code came to me while I was attending Utah State in the 80's. I had an Osbourne 1 and was writing a version of Pong for it. I had a choice between Basic or Pascal, I chose Basic because it was difficult to do direct screen writes in Pascal. After I completed the project, I was dissatisfied because the game was very slow. I chose to rewrite it or rather convert the hardware manipulation to Assembly and compile it to machine code. The game was so fast that I had to write in delay loops just to see the ball (an underscored 'o').
No matter how you look at it, compiled languages are not as fast as machine code because they have to allow for generalities that machine code does not. We are not talking 5 percent; more like a 70 percent gain in app execution speed.
Today's machine are so much more powerful than the one I wrote that program on, yet often they actually operate more slowly than a computer from the 80's because of the bloat that modern languages accidentally or unintentionally add.
As programmers we have the duty to use our customers resources as lightly and effectively as we can.
I personally believe that we need to realign our programs to simpler languages even though this conflicts with the "Get it out the door" philosophy. Another item that might/should/could be considered is that because of the greater rigor in writing code in assembly and the greater effort required to test the code, it often had few bugs in it when released that modern code often exhibits.
Also, we have to consider where the bottleneck is; no sense in having a lightning fast web browser because we are limited by our bandwidth.
Sorry about the late reply; I have been up to my armpits in hardware problems for the last few days from about 6 am until about 2 or 3 am.
