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> That line of reasoning reminds me of the fabled sufficiently smart compiler: one day, the sufficiently smart compiler will understand what we mean in our programs and generate code that is faster than what an expert could write in C or even assembly. Unfortunately, the sufficiently smart compiler still hasn't arrived.

Hasn't it? Less and less gets written in C these days, even e.g. HFT or game engines tend to use higher-level languages.

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It hasn't. It's possible for programmers to get massive speedups by re-architecting their code to make better use of the CPU caches or avoid branch mispredictions and that happens because the compiler was not sufficiently smart to do that transformation itself.

> It's possible for programmers to get massive speedups by re-architecting their code to make better use of the CPU caches or avoid branch mispredictions

Sure, but they can, and do, do that just as well in Java as they could in C or assembly.

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