> This “law” was never really reasonable or sensible. I took two compilers courses from Dr Proebsting, and while he never discussed it in my classes, based on

> This “law” was never really reasonable or sensible. I took two compilers courses from Dr Proebsting, and while he never discussed it in my classes, based on his sense of humor I'd guess he chose "18 years" mostly as a parallel/pun on Moore's law and "18 months". In other words, I doubt he ever fit a curve and tried to make predictions. I think the whole point was to cast shade on whether compiler optimizations were all that important past a certain point. > This is why I’m personally a lot more excited about working on small manageable compiler code bases [...] It sounds like you came to the same conclusion :-)