But only because hardware got much faster, with larger resources (memory, disk). I just did a Stupid Benchmark, compiling this code:

    /*
     * Standard 'C' demo... Say hello to the world
     *
     * Compile command: cc hello
     */
    #include <stdio.h>
    
    main()
    {
      printf("Hello world\n");
    }

(I know, not completely valid ANSI C code). On my home system (32 bit 2.6GHz intel gobs of RAM yada yada) it took GCC 0.2 seconds to compile and link the program (as a static program---by default it did it in 0.05 seconds). On the system I grabbed the code from (an operating system for the 8-bit MC6809) it took 35 seconds. And that was on a simulated MC6809 running on said 2.6GHz system, which is still faster, at approximately 50MHz, than a real MC6809 system of 1MHz (I thing you could get a 2MHz MC6809, but not much faster than that).

Even a state-of-the-art computer in 1980 (say, a Cray supercomputer) would have a hard time keeping up with <a href="http://www.chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/">hobbyist system of today</a>, and it's because of this increase in computing power that we've been able to have the "toy languages" of yesterday be useful languages today.

But given that CPU speeds have leveled off, the easy performance gains are pretty much gone these days.