I don't think we're screwed. I think there's a lack of theory for software complexity. Complexity is a loaded word with several definitions, so when I used it

I don't think we're screwed. I think there's a lack of theory for software complexity. Complexity is a loaded word with several definitions, so when I used it here I mean software complexity in the sense that we don't have a theory to explain how things should be modularized and grouped. In addition to just modularizing things and grouping things, How you group and modularize protects your code from future technical debt, but each modularization may also come with an associated performance cost. There just isn't a theory that unionizes all of these things together. There isn't even a theory that explains just the modularization part without the performance cost. When we don't have a theory for something we have a word for how we operate in this realm. "Design." This sort of stuff still exists in the realm of design. Anything that lives in the realm of design is very hard to fully optimize. Industries that incorporate the word "design" tend to move in trends which can ultimately be repeating circles because each change or paradigm shift is a huge unknown. Was this "design" more optimal then the last "design"? Is modern art better than classic art? Who knows? In fact the needle can often move backwards. The actual answer may be "yes", the current design is worse then the last design, but without a quantitative theory giving us a definitive answer we don't fully know, and people argue about it and disagree all the time. There are art critics but there are no math critics. Take for example the shortest distance between two points. This is a well defined problem and mathematically it's just a line. You don't "design" the shortest distance between two points. You calculate it. This is what's missing from software. Architecture and program organization needs to be calculated not designed. Once we achieve this, the terms "over engineering" and "design" will no longer be part of the field. If you squint you can sort of see a theory behind software architecture in functional programming. It's sort of there, but FP doesn't incorporate performance costs into the equation. Even without the performance metric, it's very incomplete, there is still no way to say one software architecture is definitively better than another. There may never be a way. Software may be doomed for a sort of genetic drift where it just constantly changes with no point. The complexity of software will, however be always bounded by natural selection. If it becomes too complex such that it's unmaintainable, people will abandon the technology and it will be culled from the herd of other technologies. So in terms of being "screwed" I think it's fine. But within the bounds of natural selection, there will always be genetic drift where we endlessly change between technologies and popular design paradigms. https://www4.di.uminho.pt/~jno/ps/pdbc.pdf https://www4.di.uminho.pt/~jno/ps/pdbc.pdf