I'd answer in two ways: One, it is already happening. The 10M problem (10 million concurrent open network connection) is solved by getting the Linux kernel out of the way and managing your own network stack: http://highscalability.com/blog/2013/5/13/the-secret-to-10-m... - The beauty of their approach is that they still provide a running Linux on the side to manage the non-network hardware so you have a stable base to build and debug upon.
Two, I am not sure we are that much smarter now than we were then. As you have quoted a language problem I'll use one myself as an example. See this SO question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24015710/for-loop-over-t... . I wanted to have a "simple" loop over some code instantiating several templates. I say simple, because I had first written the same code in Python and found out it was too slow for my purposes and thus rewrote in in C++. In Python this loop is dead simple to implement, just use a standard for loop over a list of factory functions. In C++ I pay for the high efficiency by turning this same problem in an advanced case of template meta programming that in the end didn't even work out for me because one of the arguments was actually a "template template". And on the other hand, making the C++ meta programming environment more powerful has its own set of problems: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2013/n361...
Two, I am not sure we are that much smarter now than we were then. As you have quoted a language problem I'll use one myself as an example. See this SO question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/24015710/for-loop-over-t... . I wanted to have a "simple" loop over some code instantiating several templates. I say simple, because I had first written the same code in Python and found out it was too slow for my purposes and thus rewrote in in C++. In Python this loop is dead simple to implement, just use a standard for loop over a list of factory functions. In C++ I pay for the high efficiency by turning this same problem in an advanced case of template meta programming that in the end didn't even work out for me because one of the arguments was actually a "template template". And on the other hand, making the C++ meta programming environment more powerful has its own set of problems: http://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2013/n361...