Though your points seem (technically) on-point, you might be missing the one facet of the "cognitive load" concept that I think is the defining one: as time ma

Though your points seem (technically) on-point, you might be missing the one facet of the "cognitive load" concept that I think is the defining one: as time marches on, entropy increases and in tech that means, cognitive load does. Every day there are new command-line tools and arguments and combinations and compositions, every week new languages, every quarter new syntax sugars in minor releases of major languages, every other year new major framework versions each with twice as many new libs/APIs as the previous release, etc etc .. even with Google and StackOverflow integrated into your hypercontextual IntelliSense etc IDE, it Just. Friggin. Grows. Out. Of. All. Control at least easily perceived so. Nevermind the constant stream of new NPM packages or fresh Haskeller-PhD papers. (And everything constantly sounds game-changing-as-heck too, funnily enough. Guess that happens when we all grow up around advertising ;) Dead-simple "ELI5" code alleviates many headaches here, simply by not piling even more layers on top of all those we can't afford to ditch in the real world, much as we'd love to. "Simple code" to "reduce cognitive load" was even an early helpful lesson for the id guys as shown a few days/weeks back: http://blog.felipe.rs/2017/02/25/id-software-programming-principles/ http://blog.felipe.rs/2017/02/25/id-software-programming-pri... --- and they had to deal with way fewer foreign/3rd-party baggage, writing Asm/C for DOS games that run just a tiny level above lowest. At some point we'll all switch to Brainfuck: at least, there's only 8 primitives to keep in your mind at all times ;) seriously Assembly language is becoming ever more appealing. With fewer abstractions, you get more LoC but at least you grasp exactly what's meant to happen. Higher-level intent not so much, regrettably, unless commented of course.