You don't need an ASIC in the way the article's challenge described the lunch problem. Do it with an MCU. The article goes into how the author did it at the reg

You don't need an ASIC in the way the article's challenge described the lunch problem. Do it with an MCU. The article goes into how the author did it at the register level, but that is not how a modern audience would do it. If you're doing registers, it's probably for your MCU's CORDIC peripheral etc for trig! You can even go fancy with floating point if you want (Probably elims the $0.30 MCUs). Tiny, cheap, and you can model it using appropriately expressive data structures (like rust enums) that handle the edge cases at the CPU level. I don't mean to dismiss your comment; it's important. I think this article is skirting a gray area of which constraints are applied. Then the conclusion is altered. Is it saying making a 4-function calculator is complicated!, or is it saying making a 4-function calculator is complicated if you add a number of specific restrictions and requirements (No modern CPU code, exact behavior replication to all combinations of user input etc). The latter is less interesting.