I'm starting to look at it like this -- imagine writing an entire web app with Rails. Then, imagine re-writing it from scratch as a single page app, say with An

I'm starting to look at it like this -- imagine writing an entire web app with Rails. Then, imagine re-writing it from scratch as a single page app, say with Angular. Then, imagine rewriting it _from scratch again_with React. (Obviously this is just a thought experiment, but an interesting one). _Something_ in your brain would remain the same through all of those projects. By discovering and articulating that something, you have arrived at more clarity on your domain. You've also made an asset that is more "fundamental" than the 3 web apps themselves. This asset would help you if you ever needed to port to other technologies in the future. You would also get incredible mileage out of this asset. It would represent the "skeletal structure" behind everything else you need to build, which means you'd have something like a, eh, 40% head start on most things. Maybe a 40% head start on automated tests, a 40% head start on validation code, etc. This would most likely lead you down the path of code generation, aka "everything is a compiler." It sounds promising and interesting, but I cannot "prove" the ROI. The time it would take to discover and articulate that "true core" could be significant (though in reality it wouldn't require rebuilding the same product 3 times). It seems primitive that we typically insist on articulating what we've understood about the domain in the same general purpose programming language that we intend to implement the solution in, and that we do so almost without being aware we're making that assumption.