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Here are the three principles I currently all believe mesh together in discussing stable foundations.

1. Sustainability

2. Chaos

3. Reorganization

Programming in the large has a natural ecosystems quality to it. It resists standardization and falls into patchworks easily. So I have come around to the idea that one should embrace the change and discover points of stability by accident. The sustainable part happens when the system survives chaos and is sufficiently flexible to be reorganized - i.e. there is a benchmark for passing the test.

Long story short, it doesn't come easily by design. Designing small and designing to retarget your output are good ideas, because that reduces two forms of change cost. But we trip over the problem of having immediate solutions at the cost of complexity and single-use implementation. Designing for extension turns your system into a platform, which gives it a definite kind of lifespan and ability to address new problems.

I worked with Go for a while and gradually got fed up with the accumulation of little issues. I have come to the conclusion that Haxe - and most transpiled languages - do the job of sustainability better than Wirthian languages, actually, because being retargetable allows your code some insulation from platform changes. The intent is preserved, and the bulk of breaking changes occur outside the compiler tooling. A cost is paid in having to debug multiple times and often at a distance from the original source, and in having imperfect access to platform features, but this is a much smaller thing than having a codebase with hidden dependencies, which is a thing that constantly sneaks into native code systems, and a thing that makes VM language runtimes grow over time.