alt Hacker News[Autovectorization is not a programming model](https://pharr.org/matt/blog/2018/04/18/ispc-origins).
Sure, obviously, we will not undersatnd every single little thing down to the tiniest atoms of our universe. There are philosophical assumptions underlying everything and you can question them (quite validly!) if you so please.
However, there are plenty of intermediate mental models (or explicit contracts, like assembly, elf, etc.) to open up, both in "engineeering" land and "theory" land, if you so choose.
Part of good engineering as well is deciding exactly when the boundary of "don't cares" and "cares" are, and how you allow people to easily navigate the abstraction hierarchy.
That is my impression of what people mean when they don't like "magic".
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I phrase I use is spooky action at a distance. Quantum entanglement but with software.
> Then, when it fails [...], you can either poke it in the right ways or change your program in the right ways so that it works for you again. This is a horrible way to program; it’s all alchemy and guesswork and you need to become deeply specialized about the nuances of a single [...] implementation
In that post, the blanks reference a compiler’s autovectorizer. But you know what they could also reference? An aggresively opaque and undocumented, very complex CPU or GPU microarchitecture. (Cf. https://purplesyringa.moe/blog/why-performance-optimization-....)