Along these lines there was a fairly funny post on comp.lang.c a 
few years ago between someone who KNEW that it was impossible 
to write DOOM in ANSI Standard C because ANSI C was way way way 
to slow.  He got a response from some one named dmr at research.att.com
who was complaining that it had absorbed all of the leisure
time in his lab and yes it built with their ansi c compilers.

This went back and forth for a while until someone pointed out
that dmr might know something about C, being the author of one
of the main books about C.


"Andreas Raab" <Andreas.Raab at gmx.de> wrote:
> Jon,
> 
> > As anyone who has done any serious 3D game development realizes,
> > Squeak will probably never be fast enough to do a "modern"
> > first-person shooter.
> 
> I'm sure that if you start from that point you'll have plenty of ways to
> prove it ;-)  Ah ... do you remember the days when people "knew" that you
> can't possibly write an operating system in a high-level language like C?!
> ;-)
> 
> Sorry couldn't resist,
>   - Andreas