[dragonwriter]

> moving towards the understanding that all software problems are data transformation problems.

But this understanding is fundamentally, deeply wrong, in the same way that civil engineering based approaches to software engineering are wrong for most software applications.

That is: yes, all software systems are data transformation systems, but most software problems are not “how do I produce the system most narrowly tailored to the present requirements” but more often “how to engineer a system for success with the pace and kind of change that we can expect over time in this space”.

(Now, games, particularly, are both pushing the limits of hardware and fairly static, so making them narrowly-tailored, poorly adaptable static works is often not wrong. But that doesn't generalize to all, or even most, software.)

[sitkack]

That is how you think about the software you write. System evolution is only one aspect. Most patterned OO codebases I have come across were *not* engineered for evolution. Sure there were some classes you could implement or replace, but the complexity was not paid back later.

Design principles can be applied to all implementation mechanisms.