How would software look if hardware had stopped improving long ago?

I think those folks missed some points. If hardware had stopped improving circa 1995, assembly language programming would be far more important than it is now. In 1995, there were still lots of people who did x86 assembly all the time. They would have been more than happy to keep doing it to get 2% faster programs. All the fancy types and typechecking done on C programs by GCC would never have happened. C++ might not have gotten so baroque, and Java might not have taken off.