The tl;dr is that there's an almost infinite number of ways to atomize/conceptualize code into meaningful "units" (to "register" it, in my supervisor's words), and the most appropriate way to do that is largely perspectival — it depends on what you care about after the fact, and there is no single maximal way to do it up front.
I mean to have an improvement over the status quo we need to simply find a conception that works better than lines as units of code. Let’s not let perfect be the enemy of the good.
love to tell someone who literally wrote a masters thesis on a topic what we need to "simply do" to solve it lol. I almost want to admire the confidence but
The tl;dr is that there's an almost infinite number of ways to atomize/conceptualize code into meaningful "units" (to "register" it, in my supervisor's words), and the most appropriate way to do that is largely perspectival — it depends on what you care about after the fact, and there is no single maximal way to do it up front.