While I'm very sympathetic to Allen's viewpoint, it seems that there was, and still is, a large class of problems where C-like languages (where the programmer d

While I'm very sympathetic to Allen's viewpoint, it seems that there was, and still is, a large class of problems where C-like languages (where the programmer does the optimizations) are better than high level languages with optimized compilers. The best example for her case would be Fortran, where the language is both higher level, and faster, because the compiler can make much more assumptions (my understanding is the restrict keyword somewhat evens the playing field with C, but that is kind of a hack). However, plenty of numerical work is also done in C, in spite of Fortran's availability.