Awful and mediocre programmers (the majority) are trying their hardest to make their software as inefficient as possible so as to completely or mostly eliminate any advantages we get from the latest and greatest technologies.
Man, I'd say we are leaving the point where the bad programmers can slow these machines down and we're not looking back. The downside to this is that it's going to fully encourage those bad programmers to continue their bad practices since "their program runs great!" (because of the hardware, not their good coding skillz)!
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?