Earlier quoted context omitted.
The implications of Karnaugh maps and state machine reduction, which we did in "Digital Logic" when I was a student, were that you could take any problem, express it as a set of states and transforms, and boil that down to an optimal netlist of discrete logic gates. Of course, in the mid 80's that was a pedagogical tool to lead us toward register machines and von Neumann architectures, but there were still some old-s…
Ya let's start programming exclusively in asm again as well \s
Since you posted this comment, we've seen a very interesting article
on formal languages and 'program proving compilers based on separation
logic'. The basis for truly correct, reusable, "eternal code" is in
fact to regress to something not unlike ASM but combined with a
Rust-like higher level.
Always good to remain mindful that what we assume is 'progress' in one direction may not be progress overall, and that allowing backtracking to older interpretations is actually a more mature scientific stance.