I agree about the importance of tradeoffs. Looking at the historical perspective, though, the reason that every principle is a tradeoff is that the principles t

I agree about the importance of tradeoffs. Looking at the historical perspective, though, the reason that every principle is a tradeoff is that the principles that are uniformly worse get discarded. For instance, structured programming (building code out of blocks with structured control flow rather than a pile of gotos) was victorious in the 1970s. Nowadays nobody considers the tradeoffs of using if-then-else versus gotos; structured code is the automatic choice. Self-modifying code was very popular in the 1950s (since it was the only way to get many things done), but essentially nobody uses it now. Modularity is another victorious principle of software development, winning out over big blobs of code with global variables. Using a stack for subroutine calls used to have tradeoffs, but now nobody would consider an alternative. Looking at the long perspective, there is real progress in software development (although slower than I'd hope).