Is it the magical solution to all of life&#x27;s problems?  No.  It is damn impressive.  Yes.<p>Right now we live in a world where everything we do depends on multiple layers of 10s-100s of millions of lines of code <i>each</i> for the compilers, the operating systems, the browsers or platform libraries (ex Qt).  It&#x27;s physically impossible to <i>read</i> a significant amount of the code in any of these layers, much less understand it.  Then we get to add in modules and libraries like Boost or Js-Framework-Melange-Of-The-Week and we don&#x27;t even know how anything we are doing with the topmost platform level even works.  We&#x27;ve gone from Fortran to this in 60 years.  What is this going to look like in another 60 years?<p>An alternative future is something like Nile.  Reading Nile&#x27;s code requires some up-front study.  That sounds like work compared to &quot;I can look at a for-loop in any package and know instantly that it is for-looping er... something... for some reason...&quot;  But, it&#x27;s the kind of up-front study that is reasonable for a smart high schooler to pull off.  With reasonable effort, that kid could understand literally every character of the Nile source and start making major, sweeping modifications.  Contrast that with Cairo --which at a high level is not much more complex than Nile, but I&#x27;ll be damned if anyone but it&#x27;s maintainers can claim to understand every line and make major changes.