While we're all joyfully lighting up blue for the improving prospects for autistic kids, it's worth a moment for all the autistic adults - most of whom still have no idea they're any different from the rest of us. And for the lonely few who've worked it out, and are still stuck in a world that expects them to be no different from the rest of us.

I soldered transistor shift registers together in the sixties. In 68 IBM taught me Fortran Everyone should know that a series of simple steps can yield useful results.Past that, if a kid hasn't the taste for it then enforcing learning isn't going to help

Why, there was that time back in Melbourne when we, having failed to corner the market for 8086 assemblers and COBOL compilers, were trying to prove we could make an APL machine...

C++ is "slower" than C because all those fancy object constructs tend to compile into *lots* of C
If your goal is blinding speed of execution then the close you can get to machine registers the better. C can get closer than anything except assemblers and is portable.
If your goal is blinding speed of development, then you're in IDE territory. Maintainability? Well, there you start to come down to architecture.
And, once you start down that track it's hard to stop before you get to XML documents delivered by XForms and processed by XQuery.
Mind you, if you don't stop before you get there you'll never get anything done.

Anathem really is a dream of a book. Burying all the sense of technology so deep in history that it's irrelevant is a feat that's been attempted before but never so completely accomplished. And the geek who saves the world is such an archetypal fantasy. Even if Stephenson never gets rich, he'll inspire generations of writers to come.