Modular software is a great idea, always was; and fundamentalism doesn't make software better, never did. Good ideas are compromises. The latest system I desig

Modular software is a great idea, always was; and fundamentalism doesn't make software better, never did. Good ideas are compromises. The latest system I designed professionally was an ordering system that's divided into two parts; a local application with a database and an HTML document and a PHP script on a server. The application itself doesn't need internet access to work. The data needed for the online customer order module is uploaded to the server via FTP as needed. Online orders are stored on the server and polled via FTP on request from the local application. The result is modular, very easy to maintain, and performance is good enough to be considered a feature. But the reasons for the choices I made are all about the problem being solved, not organizing developers and keeping them from stepping on each others toes.