> electronics engineers routinely design systems with millions of components, intricate timing relationships, and complex interactions between subsystems. Yet they don’t rely on anything analogous to our type checkers.

Disclaimer: not hardware engineer.

However as a junior in college we had several classes using VHDL and later Verilog. They have types. They are used to simulate design before committing it to board.

I would be surprised people brute force it often.

Right. Try building thousands of transistors without rigorous EDA and basic checking in VHDL. This article is such a bad take.

Physics provides a cruel form of type checking that electronics engineers have to deal with, in a way that software doesn’t. Put the wrong voltage on a trace and the type checker fails in a puff of smoke.

Since software won’t be subjected to physics, we have to introduce our own laws to constrain reality. Type checkers are exactly that.