Comment by luke-stanley

You're right, and when the behaviour of large codebases violates expectations, the intertwined webs of code are problems. Alan Kay's Viewpoints Research studied this, and famously Kay proposed "t-shirt sized algorithms", where short rules can be used to make even fancy desktop word processing and presentation software. There are also projects like From NAND to Tetris that show understanding a full stack is achievable. Could this go broader, and deeper? Of course, and this is what Bret Victor is getting at. Not just for when code goes wrong, but to make it more modifiable and creative in the first place (See Maggie Appleton's essay/talk "Home-Cooked Software and Barefoot Developers"). Projects like SerenityOS show how powerful "small" software can be. For instance, its spin-off project, the Ladybug browser has vastly fewer lines of code compared to Chromium, and yet it seems that the Ladybug team is able to implement one specification after another. Last I saw, they were close to meeting the minimum feature set Apple requires for shipping as a browser on iOS.