Do you love ("very") high-level languages? Like Lisp, Smalltalk, Python, Ruby? Or maybe Haskell, ML? I love high-level languages. Do you think high-level languages would run fast if the stock hardware weren't "brain-damaged"/"built to run C"/"a von Neumann machine (instead of some other wonderful thing)"? You do think so? I have a challenge for you. I bet you'll be interested. Background: I work on the definition of custom instruction set processors (just finished one). It's fairly high-end stuf...