I'll give Tom Yager this - when he's wrong, it's not by a little bit. He famously predicted that Apple would not move to the x86 (and then whitewashed the page). Today, Yager is spouting utter nonsense. First, this:

Where do things stand now? Fearless C, C++, and Objective-C developers have tools of their dreams that let them dig deeper than ever before into system, OS, and CPU internals. Optimization, at which .Net and Java can only play, is hot as compilers -- including the free GNU Compiler Collection -- evolve from heuristic to automated empirical optimization. Development tools watch your application run and then retune it based on observed behavior.

Hmm - I guess the HotSpot technology is something he missed. In a fully dynamic system (Smalltalk is where that tech came from), an optimizing JIT can make the code better as it runs, not just once - and retain full portability. Kind of nice when you want to have the same runtime shared between Windows, Mac, and Linux. Next, he just runs right off the rails:

Here’s a native code prediction that’s way under your radar: We’ll see more use of assembly language. When developers dare to handcraft architecture-dependent code, the performance of an application or a tweaked open-source OS can take off. Mac users know how far a simple change can take you; a lot of applications you wouldn’t think of as math-intensive go stratospheric when they’re enhanced for PowerPC’s AltiVec vector math accelerator. Developers coding for new, controlled deployments can afford to set high requirements that include a 64-bit CPU, OS, and drivers. And if you know you’re coding for Opteron and you’re ready to write to that architecture, baby, life is a highway.

Umm yeah Tom - I won't hold my breath waiting for that army of Assembly jockeys. Here's the thing - developer time costs real money, while CPU time is getting increasingly cheaper. Most development (yes, I know there are plenty of exceptions) do not need low level tweaks to be performant; better table design and cleaner SQL is usually a far bigger problem.

I'm not sure which part of the IT industry Yager is watching, but I'd guess that the color of the sky is different there. Here's a link to a post that shows some of Yager's other greatest hits.