alt Hacker NewsThis is similar to my view. All these "laws" should alwaye be used as guidance not as actual laws. Same with O. I think its good advice to design software so adding features that are orthogonal to other features don't require modifying much code.
That's how I view it. You should design your application such that extension involves little modifying of existing code as long as it's not necessary from a behavior or architectural standpoint.
Of course you can do that & still make a mess. E.g. by deciding that all your behavior will be "configurable" by coding inside strings in a YAML file, and what YAML files you load at runtime determine which features you get. Sure, they might conflict, but that's the fault of whoever wrote that "configuration" YAML. (Replace YAML with XML for a previous era version of this bad idea).