Yes, compilers have gotten much better at optimising some forms of generic code over the past few decades. This is great! But it's not like the war is won. Stag

Yes, compilers have gotten much better at optimising some forms of generic code over the past few decades. This is great! But it's not like the war is won. Staged, reactive, and incremental programming, for example, are still areas of very active research. Good implementations of these let us write code at a higher-level and yet avoid the interpretative overhead of evaluating them naively. Without such implementations people just perform the optimisations by hand (although they usually don't think of it this way) - a lot of imperative UI code is like this, for example. Who knows what the next frontier will be?