As someone who is also largely self taught in cs terms, it's actually very amazing to me how even very abstract ideas which seem to be very far away from a "solution" to a "problem" often fall into place very nicely.
For example consider a unification algorithm (e.g. https://reasoning.page/29021/unification-sort-of-in-rust which is an explanation of it that I wrote). The individual parts of it do not seem that spectacular, and also seem quite abstract. It is so simple (in my mind) that it could not possibly be correct. However, there is an emergent property when the interactions between the different parts of the program are taken together.
Doesn't this presuppose that what works with n things will work equally well for 1000 * n things?
For example, the artisan workshops of Paris worked really well at making things but it turns out that they couldn't be scaled up to produce at an industrial scale.
Whenever I see things like this I tend to think back to this:
> Largely I think that text is already a highly-structured graphical notation, and that when people try to get "away" from it they're often doing so from a position of ignorance of how very long it took to get to where we are in textual notations, and how very many technical innovations are latent in textual notations. Visually unambiguous yet uniform symbol sets, combinatorial-positional word formation, linear spatio-temporal segregation, punctuation and structured page layout .. these are all technologies in writing that we had to laboriously invent, and they have purposes, advantages! Similarly in coding, we had to invent and adapt technologies from verbal and mathematical notations refined over millennia: lines and columns, indentation, block layout, juxtaposition and precedence, scope, evaluation order, comments, grammars, version control, diff and merge algorithms ... the pile of structuring technologies embedded in the textual representation of programs isn't free, and it isn't useless. So I'm just really cautious when people suggest throwing it all out for some hypothetical reinvention. You need those structures: so you've got an immediate problem of "what are you going to use instead", and a longer-term question of "what makes you think you're not going to wind up right back at the same place ten thousand years of refining graphemes-on-a-page wound up"?