[whstl]

I feel like systems design is a bit like the Anna Karenina quote, every good software is alike, but the bad ones are different in their own way.

The Gary Bernhardt talk "Boundaries" shows an end result that is very close to The Onion Architecture presented here. And Onion is of course very close to the also popular Clean Architecture and Hexagonal Architecture. Which at the end are very close to applications built using the principles that cjohnson318 mentioned: "have well defined interfaces, and pass simple data through them".

This is all very close to some of the principles Bertrand Meyer teaches. For example, having different modules that make decisions and different modules that perform actions. Which is close to Event Sourcing and CQRS. Which once again is close to BASIC having SUBs and FUNs.

Sure, under a microscope you will have different terminologies, and even apply different techniques and patterns, but the principles in the end are very similar. You might not have anti-corruption layers anywhere, as the sibling commenter mentioned, but that's missing the forest for the trees: the end goal and end result are virtually the same, even if the implementation is different.

In the end happy families have different socioeconomic backgrounds, different ethnicities and religions, but they're still alike. It's the bad ones that have lots of special cases and exceptions everywhere in their design or whatever it is.