The article seems to be lamenting three things:<p>1) Batteries-included web frameworks (like Rails and Django)<p>2) Interpreted languages without strict typing (like Ruby and Python)<p>3) Programmers relying on large numbers of dependencies (e.g. ruby gems), and the resulting difficulty in reasoning about the software<p>The last paragraph then goes on to suggest that different languages are required.  This seems wrong.  If you want to write web software you can reason about, you can still use web frameworks (maybe Flask or Sinatra) and you can still use third party packages (gems or things from pypi).<p>If you import a library (left pad or whatever) and call it from your code, then you can still reason about what&#x27;s going on.  The problem comes when you rely on adding packages that just talk directly to your framework (like Django middleware).  Once you do that a few times, you really don&#x27;t know what&#x27;s going on between a web request hitting your server, and your own code running.