Once again, Neal Stephenson predicted the future in his novel Termination Shock. It's this exact situation.

I agree.. I'm sure if new observations showed that there must be new and unknown physics, beyond the Standard Model, every scientist would be overjoyed. After all, any of us who grew up watching Star Trek has got to have the hope that the future will be full of amazing technology and science.

For every retirement age scientist who doesn't want to believe that everything they've studied in their career is wrong (and I suspect there are not very many that feel this way) there is another who is just starting out who is delighted by the prospect that there are new things to discover.

In my opinion, the biggest miss from Netflix was no way to rent or buy any movie or show, like Amazon allows you to do. Their bundled catalog has been shrinking, so I'm more likely to not find the title I want, so I go to Amazon and pay the $4. Why can't Netflix offer the same options? Are the negotiations with the rights holders too hard without a huge diversified company behind them?

I think the overall point still stands, though - this new code will have computationally intensive inner loops written in efficient languages.

If you compare a computationally expensive operation, like matrix inversion, by doing naive implementations in both c and python, of course c or rust is going to be 100x better. But in any production code, operations like that are going to be implemented in the same highly optimized libraries for all of those languages, such as blas.

The trade-off is really performance and reliability versus speed of implementation. It makes the most sense to write the majority of an application in a high-level language such as python or kotlin (i.e. safe Java) and then go back and optimize the bottlenecks in a language like rust (i.e. safe C). You get all the benefits of rapid development, efficient execution, and power efficiency.

Didn't he already publish this idea 20 years ago?