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I'm currently tending a 16 year old Java codebase, with very little in the way of maintenance in the years since it was written.

"Software over time tends towards monsterism." is apt in my mind.



Any constraint not imposed by a compiler is a degree-of-freedom that will drive a system toward complexity. It takes extraordinary effort and discipline to avoid this, especially over the long term. (One way of thinking about what architecture is is defining what allowed DoFs are on a system, so if you need to add a field to a form or implement some feature, the architecture is the thing that maps to individual concrete artifacts.)




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