[Chris_Newton]

Modular design at any scale has a natural tension between looser coupling and higher cohesion. If you split up a large code base into many small parts, each part can be simpler and looser coupling between parts may improve maintainability. On the other hand, now you must to co-ordinate those parts somehow, and making up for the loss of cohesion introduces a kind of complexity you didn’t have before.

This tension exists at any scale, from a single-developer hobby project up to massive enterprise projects and OSS giants, so I challenge the original premise of this blog post that having a large code base is the root cause of the problem. Going too far in either direction can result in absurdity, whether that’s “enterprise software” levels of boilerplate (too much tight coupling) or DLL hell and typical Linux package management (not enough cohesion).