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The most distinctive thing about humans is not the thumb, of course. It is design. Unlike any other animal, we incessantly and dramatically reshape both ourselves and our environment. We design ourselves through innovating concepts, language, culture, and other practices, and we design almost everything around us. It is telling that we now speak of “natural” places on the Earth to distinguish the few places we have not (yet!) redesigned.

Among the most complex, diverse, and pervasive things that humans design are software systems. The history of software design is almost entirely a history of trying to catch up with complexity and diversity. As we look back to the 1960s the notion of what was then called the “software crisis” seems almost amusing. At that time, barely a decade after the invention of software, it was recognized that the complexity and diversity of software systems was being elaborated far more …