[jakejake]

What seems to happen with me is that I'm fairly happy with the initial release. Then as the changes start piling on, eventually one of them will require a major conceptual change. Of course that could take months, or you can put a band-aid on in 2 days. In this day and age of startup mentality I don't know many programmers who are afforded the luxury to spend months on a task that can be hacked in a few days. Anyway, the code can survive a few rounds of that before it starts getting really ugly and then I'm apologizing with the best of them.

[singular]

This, to me, has a lot to do with the languages and tools used on a project - the more 'locked in' to a structure you are, the bigger that cost will be when something changes.

This has been a concern of mine w.r.t. oop as implemented in C# (and by extension java), as the structure can be very costly to change down the line when the inevitable 'pivot' in implementation occurs.

[jakejake]

True and it seems like no matter how much foresight I have and how much abstraction we code in, eventually some change comes along that nobody saw coming.