Many of the issues that come up with applied information theory to practical code are of the form "oh, but it won't be fast if we do it that way". The end of the article links Alan Kay discussing STEPS and how it solves many computing. fundamentals needed for a desktop in miniscule amounts of code. One of the comments to that video, made five years ago, dismisses it as unrealistic ivory tower nonsense that can't run fast enough. (Notwithstanding, the presentation was given on a running system demonstrating the proof of concept)
But there is a similar sentiment to Kay's from the bottom-up viewpoint. The Forth community, who have made livings on implementing this kind of succinct design in commercial settings, tend to point to hardware manufacturers themselves as the primary difficulty. Their business is to sell you more hardware than you need, and that leads them towards doing nothing to help with the software crisis, but rather, to encourage processing and I/O to be complex things to reason about, with complex protocols and mystery-meat drivers. If you have to use USB, Bluetooth, TCP/IP...you're stuck. Nobody wants to deal with those hot potatoes. You can't address it properly by running up the abstraction stack and doing "everything in the browser". That's playing nicely with the standards instead of attacking them. When software companies play along and say "well, it's the standard so we have to use it," their problem gets deeper.
Some room could be conceded to say that some of that complexity is essential, but one of the ways in which we describe progress in science and technology is to find solutions that are lighter and simpler to understand, e.g. instead of astronomical tables describing "Earth at the center of the universe" epicycles, smaller equations describing orbits around the Sun.
But there is a similar sentiment to Kay's from the bottom-up viewpoint. The Forth community, who have made livings on implementing this kind of succinct design in commercial settings, tend to point to hardware manufacturers themselves as the primary difficulty. Their business is to sell you more hardware than you need, and that leads them towards doing nothing to help with the software crisis, but rather, to encourage processing and I/O to be complex things to reason about, with complex protocols and mystery-meat drivers. If you have to use USB, Bluetooth, TCP/IP...you're stuck. Nobody wants to deal with those hot potatoes. You can't address it properly by running up the abstraction stack and doing "everything in the browser". That's playing nicely with the standards instead of attacking them. When software companies play along and say "well, it's the standard so we have to use it," their problem gets deeper.
Some room could be conceded to say that some of that complexity is essential, but one of the ways in which we describe progress in science and technology is to find solutions that are lighter and simpler to understand, e.g. instead of astronomical tables describing "Earth at the center of the universe" epicycles, smaller equations describing orbits around the Sun.