A guide for newcomers to software engineering, and for anyone curious about how LLMs are changing it. Built from interviews with senior professionals from the tech industry.
A lot of the complexity comes from the lack of expressivity in languages to relate variables (or data structure fields) semantically to each other. If there was a way to tell the compiler "these variables are always accessed in tandem", the compiler could be smart about ordering and memory fences.
The idea to extend programming languages and type systems in that direction is not new: folk who've been using distributed computing for computations have to think about this already, and could teach a few things to folk who use shared memory multi-processors.