ok, it got well offtopic but my prev comment was confusing indeed, so: - you're right, that's what documentation is for, but people rarely document things like

ok, it got well offtopic but my prev comment was confusing indeed, so: - you're right, that's what documentation is for, but people rarely document things like use cases and workflows and I've rarely seen comments like "this complex optimization is here because a delay longer than X ms is intolerable for workflows like ... or because otherwise you'll have inconsistent data when connectivity to external service Y breaks at the same time as service Z crashes ... and this actually happens very often because the user tends to do N and P at the same time and almost always ignores warning/error Q" - "platform dependent knowledge and code that cannot be abstracted away": if you write a tablet app, you will need to take into consideration things like touch ui, impermanent internet connectivity and so on, if you consider the "platform" to be the devices. At other levels, if your "platform" is the browsers you'll have code that reacts to browser differences. If you use Ruby your platform will be the ruby interpreter and you'll also have code that is written somehow because of the platform limitation (gc problems, multithreading problems) ...I'm talking about the kinds of applications where 80% of the code is actually the UI code. If your balance differs, you can probably have good abstractions in your no-UI code. But for interface heavy applications (it doesn't have to be UI, it can be interfaces with lots of external web APIs), porting will always be a nightmare and you'll lose stuff at every porting and have to rediscover/reinvent it. - "orthogonal" - my bad, I should have just said "they are independent" or "I don't think they really influence each other's evolution", I thought this word has already grown roots in the tech vocabulary and it's a nice engineery metaphor that I really like (I just think of perpendicular vectors and independent dimensions and since I'm more of a picture thinker that only later translates his thought in words it just seems intuitive to me - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonality http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orthogonality) - the Web: I agree, it's "butt ugly duct-tape driven" indeed but that's the thing with things that evolve, you don't get to control the evolution, nobody really gets to do this, we all pull in different direction and some organic emergent behavior appears... hopefully it will crawl out of the current state to a less chaotic state that would enable more sane workflows for developers