Solve Less General Problems
The interesting thing is that the programmer's tendency to abstract and future-proof their code mirrors the late 19th and early 20th centuries' high modernism movements, as James C. Scott analyzes in <i>Seeing Like A State</i> and Michel Foucault discusses in depth in <i>Discipline and Punish</i> and others.<p>"Modernism" is basically characterized by attempts to predict and control the future, to rationalize and systematize chaos. In the past this was done with things like top-down centrally planned economies and from-scratch redesigns of entire cities (e.g. Le Corbusier's Radiant City), even rearchitectures of time itself (the French Revolution decimal time). The same kinds of "grand plans" are repeated in today's ambitious software engineering abstractions, which almost never survive contact with reality.