[mrkmarron]

I would say accidental complexity comes from mostly historical reasons. Two sources discussed in the report are reference equality and looping. These make a ton of sense if you are implementing a language with a compiler that targets an x86 processor. They map naturally to the features of the hardware but make other tasks impractical, e.g. compilation to a FPGA or verifying a SemVer dependency update doesn’t break your application.

Section 5 of the paper explores some scenarios that, once this “accidental complexity” has been removed, become much more feasible. These types of experiences are currently aspirational, and much work remains, but the hope is to demonstrate the practicality and value of these concepts.

[thechao]

This is the exact goal of the removal of “incidental algorithms”, as described in a number of papers/talks by Sean Parent, Mat Marcus, Jaakko Järvi, et al. They mostly explore this in the setting of GUI behavior implementation.