If necessity is the mother of invention, then we'll need a lot better software shortly.
The focus should be on developer productivity first, then product iteration, then performance.
For example, try to compute CRC32 checksums of 100 byte arrays at bus speed in C/C++ and then in the higher level language of your choice.
In all seriousness though, I wonder if once Moore's law really stops we'll see a surge of innovation in compiler and language paradigms, born out of necessity. It seems to me that the revolution in higher-level languages and paradigms came because we could (computationally) afford it, so it makes sense that once the incentives change we'll see innovation in other areas.
Big 5 want to hire like crazy is a myth.
I get why it's done, but part of me wishes that CPU growth would stall off for a bit so the software industry would have no choice but to treat optimization as a selling point again.
It is not even the case of using GC and such.
Our phones are way more powerful than any Xerox PARC or Lisp Machine ever was.
The research project is http://invasic.de
I really like this change of course.
Of course I'd be loading a lot of data from disk into RAM that would have simply been encoded as immediate values in the executable before. But my rough estimate still puts this at (at least) an order of magnitude less RAM than abstraction layers like WPF use.
And that's when I realized: we jumped from severely resource constrained designed straight to completely wasteful designs without adequately exploring the design space in between. To paraphrase Richard Feynman's quote, "There's plenty of room at the bottom": "There's plenty of room in the middle."