show me all you want from later years but this in itself shows a time when extremely efficient coding was in evidence, and there is not a single 8mhz 8086 + 16bit Soundblaster equivalent of the C64 Music Demo as produced for Amiga.
If we're talking about sound playback, it's pretty much a no-brainer no-cpu task on the Amiga compared to PC's with sound blaster cards, thanks to the Paula. I don't think that it's a fair comparison when it comes to "efficient coding."
Now, filling the VGA frame buffer without blitters, hardware sprite engines, coppers etc. and playing back sound having to fill a sound buffer with new samples every few milliseconds -- as it was typically done in the early PC demoscene -- that requires efficient coding!
Of course, there are some effects that are easier to do on a PC just because of these differences (and PC's generally have a lot faster processors), so I wouldn't be to quick about making a "coding efficiency" comparison.
As for today, I think "coding efficiency" is a small trade-off considering the advantages abstract API-based high level programming has. Portability, compatibility, readability, maintainability, integrability, standards compliance etc. (not to mention things like, say, memory protection...) are all instrumental qualities for the development of bug free and complex software.
We wouldn't have things like Firefox today if it was written in hand-optimized and unstructured assembler by a single developer whose ultimate goal instantaneous start-up time and full frame rate on an 80's computer.
