> It's also important to remember that many "simple" operations, such as "print the date one hour from now", or "read the user's name" hide huge complexity enco

> It's also important to remember that many "simple" operations, such as "print the date one hour from now", or "read the user's name" hide huge complexity encoded in human context and history. obviously true. but are those operations more complex than, say, what a modern cpu does? think of the effectively infinite number of details of computation that the cpu i am using to type this message is hiding from me. i don't need to know. it's all taken care of. but for some reason, we can't embed "print the date one hour from now" into the operating system, so that particular bit of code only has to be written once and then reused infinitely, like my cpu's microcode? programmers know why this is harder than it looks, of course. but is it really unsolvable? i hope not.