> compiler optimization will rarely make last year's program faster, but it will make next year's program faster. This doesn't follow. From your argument, las

> compiler optimization will rarely make last year's program faster, but it will make next year's program faster. This doesn't follow. From your argument, last years and next years programs will run the same speed (about as fast as they can). It's just that next year's programs can be cleaner in some sense... Which is interesting, because Dr. Proebsting's page also says his current interests include improving programmer productivity by removing syntactic baggage from statically typed languages.