Funny to realize Adam Smith knew we had to refactor our code

That's what I thought at first too. Then I pulled my head out of my ass and realized that Adam Smith, in roughly 1800 or so, had no way to even conceive of what it was I would be doing for a living 200 years in the future and was, in fact, talking about plain oldfashioned engineering, something humans have been doing for ages. When I write code to solve a particular problem I am not, as I am sometimes wont to think, performing a spectacular feat of futuristic wizardry. Instead, I am doing something quite similar to what my ancestors have been doing for hundreds of thousands of years on the plains of Africa and elsewhere, which is to create hopefully useful tools out of whatever materials are available.

Which is why software engineering and systems engineering look so similar, despite having quite different developmental histories.

I notice that as I have matured as a web developer I have embraced a more and more minimalistic approach. It is interesting to see how a similar effect has happened through history.