I think this attitude is what is driving his complaints. Most engineering work exists in the context of towering teetering piles of legacy decisions, organizati

I think this attitude is what is driving his complaints. Most engineering work exists in the context of towering teetering piles of legacy decisions, organizational cultures, partially specified problems, and uncertainty about the future. Put another way "the implementation is the spec" and "everything is a remodel" are better mental models than spec-lawyering. I agree that relying on say stability of the common set of compiler optimizations circa 2015 is a terrible solution but I'm not convinced it's the wrong one in the short term. Are we really getting enough perf out of the work to justify the complexity? I don't know. It's also completely infeasible given the incentives at play, complexity and bugs are mostly externalities that with some delay burden users and customers. Personally I'm grateful the cryptographers do what they do, computers would be a lot less useful without their work.