That's true, but the trophies and points are barely any value in the day-to-day. For example, in deciding to reply to a snap, the thought "My score's gonna increase if I do this" barely crosses the mind.
It's always just about keeping the conversation. And since a lot of the conversation is filler that need not be saved forever, snaps have a unique position.
So this is all cool, and it's incredibly nifty to have the hardware insight while writing software. But these optimizations (loop tiling, loop fusion, etc) could (and, to my knowledge, ARE) part of basic gcc and java compilers. Why are they not more commonly used? Why do we have to specifically provide a flag to say "Hey btw I almost forgot, make my program 50 times faster."
I'm slightly in the dark as to why loop optimizations are not part of the default compile process.
It's always just about keeping the conversation. And since a lot of the conversation is filler that need not be saved forever, snaps have a unique position.