I thought it was very interesting about how Alan Kay and Bjarne Stroustrup may have been applying wisdom from their old fields of expertise and how that affected their philosophy.

There is an appeal to building complexity through Emergence, where you design several small self-contained pieces that have rich interactions with each other and through those rich interactions you can accomplish more complex things. Its how the universe seems to work. But I also think that the kinds of tools that we have make designing things like this largely impossible. Emergence tends to result in things that we dont expect, and for precise computation and engineering, it feels like we are not close to accomplishing this.

So the idea that we need a sense of 'omniscience' for designing programs on individual systems feels like it is the right way to go.