[ljm]

I think I agree too. Maybe not disdainful, but certainly skeptical.

I put things like SOLID and design patterns in the same bucket as scalable agile, and similar prescriptive practices. To me, they seem more concerned with organisation as opposed to exposing real business problems so that you can solve them, and as a result you're wrestling with the abstraction and the glue code more than the business logic.

A finite state machine is my favourite example, as I've seen all kinds of 'well-organised' setups that could have been massively simplified as an FSM.

Whatever the right architecture and tech is, I've become more convinced over time that the easier it is to delete bits of your code, the better. And that doesn't always mean you go full-on OOP. More to the point, 'maintainable' is massively subjective. Many of the metrics we use to measure that are utterly shallow.