The original article is not about these things. It is about the difficulty of the rigor increasing. From some sort of easy encoding of computation into integer

The original article is not about these things. It is about the difficulty of the rigor increasing. From some sort of easy encoding of computation into integer math to doing Fourier analysis over booleans. From maths you can grok in a few hours to the horrendously complex stuff in number theory that takes days and you aren’t really sure you get it. In neither case is it a matter of theory vs practice. It is that the mechanics used by theorists is a lot more difficult than a few decades ago. Actual software development becoming like engineering, which seems counter to my experience, is a different issue. In my experience software veers away from engineering because as soon as something is standardized enough to not be novel, it’s completely captured by a library or service or something and is a solved problem. The new software is always doing something new. And there are no lessons learned, except, ironically, at the deep theory level.