Horrendous take. Humans can reason about (some) hardware chips because they are space-constrained. The analogous solution in software would be to limit the size of your programs to a human-readable size—18k loc or so.
The author seems to like black boxes. Unix corelib is a collection of black boxes[1]. So are docker containers[2]. Do you know what else are black boxes? TYPES. Specifically interfaces. Types let you compartmentalize your software into as many black boxes as you want, then compose them.
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[1] Try building any non trivial service by composing Unix corelib tools, docker containers, or REST APIs. You’re in for a world of hurt.
[2] Docker containers aren’t even really isolated. The JupyterHub DockerSpawner image spins up and tears down other docker containers at will. The whole thing is a mess of state. There’s no composition—just the container equivalent of `goto`
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