As for pens, I use the Uniball Jetstream 0.38 ballpoint--fine point, doesn't skip, and I prefer ballpoints. I used a Coleto Hitec C multi-pen for a while, but the refills are skinny and run out of ink quickly, and I like the feel of the Jetstream ballpoint better. (The refills for the regular Coleto Hitec are much thicker and last a lot longer...but skip horribly. Life is too short.)

Any Haskell function can serve as a control structure in the Algol sense, not so? As for `if(test)` that could indeed be a macro if the programmer’s a durned fool; but absent macros I don’t believe it can be a function call.

Mind you, I take your point about language familiarity; obviously people manage it.

Contrast an Algol-descendant like C, Pascal, Java, or even Python with a pure functional language like Haskell. In the former, control structure names are reserved words and control structures have a distinct syntax. In the latter, if you see `foo` in the body of a function definition you have no idea if it's a simple computation or some sophisticated and complex control structure just from what it looks like. The former provides more clues, which makes it easier to decipher at a glance. (Not knocking Haskell, here; it's an interesting language. But it's absolutely more challenging to read.)

To put it another way, syntax is the notation you use to think. Consider standard math notation. I could define my own idiosyncratic notation for standard algebra and calculus, and there might even be a worthwhile reason for me to do that. But newcomers are going to find it much harder to engage with my work.

By that metaphor, AI-controlled code-generation is more like large-scale automated manufacturing: the sort of thing that produces Ikea flat packs. I'm not knocking that; I own my share of Billy bookcases. But it's not what I do. It's not what I'm going to do in the future. There's a place for large-scale manufacturing and there's a place for hand-crafting, and this is even more true for software than it is for physical goods.

Final note: throughout my career I've know a few people with an outlook similar to mine. I'm always delighted to run into them, but they've never been common.

But I understand how my code works. There's a huge difference between not understanding the layer below and not understanding the layer that I am responsible for.

It didn't work, even for the "large" systems of that time: and Booch had worked on more than a few. The kind of "system" the OP is describing is vastly larger, and vastly more complex. Even if you could successfully apply the waterfall model to a system built over two or three years, you certainly can't for a system of systems built over 50 years: the needs of the enterprise are evolving, the software environment is evolving, the hardware platform is evolving.

What you can do, if you're willing to pay for it, is ruthlessly attack technical debt across your system of systems as a disciplined, on-going activity. Good luck with that.

As a programmer, I think in the binary units.

But the big question is, does this "Universal" distribution match up to any well known probability distribution? Or could it be described by a relatively simple probability distribution function?