The entire article goes on in great length about how awe-inspiring the
engineering of this cable is, whereas I just see a bunch of complexity that
probably didn't need to be there. The 118 layers of paper tape, and the oil
pumps, and so forth. Surely there was a simpler solution.
Take care that you don't come down with "Engineers' Disease", though - the
tendency for people with a high level of technical knowledge to decide that
their knowledge must be applicable to specialised fields that they don't
actually know a lot about.
You are a programmer, not an electrical engineer. Wild speculation regarding a field you know little about is not attractive.
Allow me to reverse your statement.
"I don't see why programming for multicore processors has to be so complex. Why not just run four copies of the program on all four cores?"
"I don't see why every web site makes you create a new account. Why not log into everything with my facebook account?"
"I don't see why the legal system has to be so complex. Why not just have the judge decide everything, and get rid of the lawyers?"
Message passing is more robust than the currently prevailing shared memory + thread spaghetti practice. Many/most problems being attacked with the latter approach can be reformulated to use message passing and looser coupling.
Calling out parent's incompetency is fair I guess, although we still don't know why it was necessary to engineer a cable so much only to find out it has basic flaws, hence the assumption it is over-engineered in certain aspects and under-engineered in others.
Allow me to reverse your statement.
"I don't see why programming for multicore processors has to be so complex. Why not just run four copies of the program on all four cores?"
"I don't see why every web site makes you create a new account. Why not log into everything with my facebook account?"
"I don't see why the legal system has to be so complex. Why not just have the judge decide everything, and get rid of the lawyers?"