[xscott]

> This “law” was never really reasonable or sensible.

I took two compilers courses from Dr Proebsting, and while he never discussed it in my classes, based on his sense of humor I'd guess he chose "18 years" mostly as a parallel/pun on Moore's law and "18 months".

In other words, I doubt he ever fit a curve and tried to make predictions. I think the whole point was to cast shade on whether compiler optimizations were all that important past a certain point.

> This is why I’m personally a lot more excited about working on small manageable compiler code bases [...]

It sounds like you came to the same conclusion :-)