[MootWoop]

Good point about the reasons of productivity leaps. Funnily enough, I recall that one of the main selling points of Java was portability (the famous "Write Once Run Everywhere"), even though C was already supposed to be portable; but the environment wasn't, and you still had to develop OS-specific code.

Anyway, yes I agree the ecosystem is key. This is why a lot of new languages are either running on the JVM (like Clojure and Scala) or are interoperable with C (like Rust and Nim). In other cases, languages have managed to create an entire ecosystem very rapidly (Node.js and Javascript in general, Ruby and others).

> The thing is that with modern hardware, even toy software projects are quite usable

You're right. I must admit I'm not a big fan of this "throw more at the problem" approach, and I wonder for how long this approach will work. After all, Moore's law is slowing down, as the unit cost per transistor has stopped decreasing after 28nm.

> but this isn't the case with hardware design.

Yes, for one because if you design hardware that is sub-optimal, in other words that requires more transistors, that translates into higher costs, and lower margins. That's some powerful incentive IMO. Not to mention that if the hardware is not powerful enough, the toy software projects that you mention will have trouble running ^^

Therefore I think a central question is the loss of performance compared to the gain in productivity. A naive translation of C to assembly leads to disastrous performance. For years (decades?) people had to resort to assembly for speed-critical routines, and you can still find assembly in video decoders for instance. But the productivity is so much higher than the loss of performance is acceptable.