If you used good objects, you'll only have to make the change in one place
IMO that's generally a retroactive statement because in practice have to be lucky for that to be true. An abstraction along one dimension -- even a good one, will limit flexibility in some other dimension.
Occasionally, everything comes into alignment and an opportunity appears to reliably-ish predict the correct abstraction the future will need.
Most every other time, you're better off avoiding the possibility of the really costly bad abstraction by resisting the urge to abstract preemptively.
I've never seen these "express code/tests in natural language" ever work well. Your non-coders need lawyer-like skills to wield English very precisely, or it falls to coders that would be better off using code directly.
problems only have one answer and often one strategy to get to the answer
Totally disagree
You're thinking of equations, which only have one answer. There are often many possible ways to solve and tackle problems.
If you'll permit an analogy, even though there's "only one way" to use a hammer and nail, the overall problem of joining wood can be solved in a variety of ways.
I think this is common in scientists and researchers. They operate at the edge of knowledge with one foot in the unverifiable and their eyes peering further still into the murky unknown. There is no map nor direction where they're going, and that extension out into the darkness is often much like superstitious belief.
What makes them different from followers of the occult that remain lost in the fog is that science returns from explorations with verifiable proof. Research extends it's own foundations with new findings in order to venture yet another step further outwards.
IMO mathematical/logical/abstract thinking is critical for programming well, but IMO that's different from "math degree" math.
Software as a means to an end can be used in almost every domain, so proficiency within that applicable domain is often either useful or necessary. That is to say, "math degree" math is likely needed for 3d rendering (certain games), scientific computation (incl machine learning), etc, but maybe not, otherwise. It depends on what software you're trying to build.
To be more specific, general programming is definitely and specifically different from trig and calc. However, because math is also broad, "mathy" concepts like type theory, relational algebra, set theory are considered important for programming, even if only informally or indirectly so.
It's the difference between knowing you'll grow and graduate together with your classmates vs knowing you're only going to see them for that one month before you move away.
Distributing power across a group of communities over the same topic (e.g. like seats in a congress/parliament) is a nice thought.
However, my second thought was how vulnerable that is in a fediverse. To continue the analogy, an adversary could create new states (server/communities) of arbitrary population (accounts) at will.
IMO factory functions are totally fine -- I hesitate to even give them a special name b/c functions that can return an object are not special.
However I think good use cases for Factory classes (and long-lived stateful instances of) are scarce, often being better served using other constructs.
Dedicated incremental static type checkers for dynamic languages already exist. In particular,
Pyright for Python is fantastic and in many ways surpasses the type systems of classic typed languages
"never see addressed"? What do you think currently happens in (real, non-hypothetical) cities with good bike infrastructure?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2dHFC31VtQ&t=365
Oh look, emergency vehicles work even better on bike infrastructure than on car infrastructure
Bicylists and pedestrians can't hard block a firetruck the way car traffic can