I suppose that depends on the language and the elegance of your programming paradigm. This is where primitive simplicity becomes important, because when your f

I suppose that depends on the language and the elegance of your programming paradigm. This is where primitive simplicity becomes important, because when your foundation is composed of very few things that are not dependent upon each other you can scale almost indefinitely in every direction. Imagine you are limited to only a few ingredients in programming: statements, expressions, functions, objects, arrays, and operators that are not overloaded. That list does not contain classes, inheritance, declarative helpers, or a bunch of other things. With a list of ingredients so small no internal structure or paradigm is imposed on you, so you are free to create any design decisions that you want. Those creative decisions about the organization of things is how you dictate the scale of it all. Most people, though, cannot operate like that. They claim to want the freedom of infinite scale, but they just need a little help. With more help supplied by the language, framework, whatever the less freedom you have to make your own decisions. Eventually there is so much help that all you do as a programmer is contend with that helpful goodness without any chance to scale things in any direction.