I've read a number of papers recently discussing various software design techniques for improving the ease with which bug-free code can be reduced. Most of these papers are infeasible in practice because they rely on new language features that aren't found in any mainstream language. For example, the paper "Out of the Tar Pit" suggests "Functional Relational Programming" as a method of reducing complexity in software. Unfortunately, I can't evaluate the efficacy of FRP in practice because there is no language allowing for it, and even if there were, it wouldn't be a language anyone would use since there would be no support for it.

In contrast to those approaches, Lamport's ideas seem quite reasonable and have the benefit of being language agnostic. He definitely has a lot of interesting ideas here!