Open Sourcing: the Ultimate Isolation » nvie.com »
We have all been schooled to isolate units of software into reusable components. Software engineering literature refers to this as separation of concerns since decades. It reduces the big problem into smaller non-overlapping problems.
We obviously try doing so, by putting related logic into modules, libraries and whatnot. Yet, in practice, so many real world projects fail at their attempts and end up evolving into something unnecessarily complicated.
The main problem with this is that it becomes increasingly hard to comprehend and reason about your software, not to mention the “increased fun” maintaining it.
Why is it so hard to actually achieve this in practice? Separating concerns apparently is easier said than done.
