It is always a pleasure to read Daniel Jackson [1].

In this paper, Daniel revisits the ideas developed in his book, "The essence of software" [2]. placing them in their historical context and opening a future for more modular software implementations.

He presents a convincing argumentation on how and why an object-oriented approach does not really contribute to reducing coupling. And his proposal is truly appealing: building an application as a set of external synchronization rules governing the interactions between modules (so called concepts). Each module comes with its own view on the entities of the application domain and provides the actions featuring the concept. Only the synchronization rules of the application relate the entities and actions of these modules.

That said, I'm left wanting more and I will need to take the time to put these ideas in code.

- [1] https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.27258

- [2] https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-essence-of-software-why-con...