Nice but still classical programming. I personally think if statements are the problem. The easiest languages are trivial ones with no branching. Not Turing complete, but they rock when applicable e.g. html, gcode
I don't think it is possible to make a program without conditional branches.
Somebody posted a link below about "Data Driven" design in C++. In it was an example of a pattern where each object has a "dirty" flag, which determines whether it needs processing, but they found that failing branch prediction here took more cycles than simply removing the branch.
My thought was, instead, what if you created two versions of that method -- one to represent when the dirty flag is true, and another to represent when the dirty flag is false -- and then instead of toggling the dirty flag, you could change the jump address for that method to point to the version it should use. If this toggle happens long enough before the the processor calls that method, you would remove any possibility of branch prediction failure =].
I have no idea if this is practical or not, but it is amusing to consider programs that modify jump targets instead of using traditional conditional branches.
Read more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predication EDIT: Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Branch_predictor
I think we more commonly use the latter, which tries to guess which way the code will branch and load the appropriate jump target. It's actually typically very successful in modern processors.
(PS angular-js has done all that dirty flag checking if you like that approach)