This resonates so hard it hurts. And yet, part of the problem here lies in the very tempting framing. "God machine" implies something that can do everything you

This resonates so hard it hurts. And yet, part of the problem here lies in the very tempting framing. "God machine" implies something that can do everything you can but better. That's very far cry from the truth. In reality we have two kinds of computation in the world now. One is slow, flexible, resilient, easily bored. The other is fast, rigid, literal-minded, mindlessly focused. When I put it like that it becomes easier to accept why things are hard. To make programming easy is to help slow, flexible computations create fast, rigid, literal-minded computations. That's an unsolved research problem. However, there is one easy problem being alluded to in the article: keeping software working over time. It's frustrating to me when I hear about somebody building a program for themselves that suffers bitrot a couple of years later. The reason is the tower of dependencies we tend to program atop. All we have to do there is stop digging the hole deeper. Shameless plug: http://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200607.pdf http://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200607.pdf