I’ve become a big proponent of static typing and the functional programming paradigm, both of which solve the problem of figuring out what you’re looking at.

With OOP and side effects you can receive a variable but still not know what it really is, is it modified somewhere before or after that you missed? Is it passed deep into nested functions that modify it? Who knows! With pure functions that goes away completely, you can easily inspect what goes into it.

Static typing also solves, among many other problems, this same issue. I’ve written a good deal of python, and anytime I go from rust, my current love affair, back to python I end up needing to take a break and go to my dog for emotional support. I’ve tried using mypy for static type analysis, I still use it, but it’s very far from perfect; not least because many of the scientific libraries I use don’t implement static type hints and are in fact written in such a way that implementing them would be difficult or nonsensical in some instances. It’s a complete nightmare. The only solution would be every one of these libraries rewriting themselves, so not likely.