One of the things that rubs me wrong are articles that present a solution with no downside. Even if I were to mostly agree with the article you quoted, surely t

One of the things that rubs me wrong are articles that present a solution with no downside. Even if I were to mostly agree with the article you quoted, surely there must be downsides to the "functional architecture"? And, sure enough, it's fairly easy to come up with them: a. Configuration complexity: if your system is generic & simple, sometimes the complexity doesn't go away, it just moves. As in the excel case quoted by the author - sometimes those excel files become a horrible unmaintainable mess that just produce wrong results and nobody can really tell. Sure, your architecture is nice, but did you make life good for the users? There's something to be said about the qualities of domain-driven software, here... b. Performance (as opposed to scalability). It's often much harder (though not impossible!) to optimize the system if it's business rules are written in the configuration. Try doing machine learning in excel... it's theoretically possible, right? And yes you can get better performance by scaling horizontally to some extent, but then you risk running a hard-to-maintain-and-costly distributed system instead of a single machine that could do everything well.