If you haven't seen Brazil, you can safely ignore that part of the post. But you should see it.

I love Brazil, I'm just not tracking how all of that fits into the above.

The article is about how DevOps is killing the role of the Developer by making the Developer be a SysAdmin.

Chuck points out that abstracting the Developer's work too far away from the system in question means the Developer doesn't really understand the system as a whole. Jeff refers to "purely development roles" and other "pure" roles that aren't necessarily natural boundaries.

The example of VHDL is not about hardware and software, but about learning that you didn't actually know something you thought you knew.

The repairmen in Brazil do not realize (or necessarily care) what they don't know about duct repair. The system allows them to function and even thrive, despite this false confidence in their understanding.

At one point at least, Google was investing in (metaphorically) having DeNiro cross-train those guys, instead of umm... Well, the rest of the movie.

I've read this a few times and it still doesn't really have any bearing on the aside I was making, which was that something was presented as a hypothetical (Imagine ...) that is the overwhelmingly typical case, and in some measure that amused and confused me.

Well, it helped that I'd been discussing the topic out of band not that long prior to the original comments...

The initial detail was that VHDL, unlike "software" languages, has very different consequences. Can you imagine a language where (1 / 0) wasn't defined away as a DIVERR, but otherwise managed to remain mostly self-consistent? Where something can be logically / syntactically coherent, but not physically possible?

And if that example didn't hit home for you, so it goes, but there was plenty of detail unrelated to the specific example that I thought was more important / interesting to discuss. :shrug: