This has been obvious to me since I graduated with a BIT majoring in 'Software design.' I literally went to university with software design and software architecture being my core interests.
When I graduated, I was shocked to learn that no company cared about any of the architectural concepts that I had learned. UML class diagrams, sequence diagrams, ER diagrams, etc... had been on the way out. At one point, as internet companies where scaling up, there was a brief resurgence of interest in sequence diagrams... Especially as a communication method when explaining complex bugs or complex message-passing scenarios. But it didn't really last. Nowadays most software is riddled with race conditions and deep exploitable architectural flaws. Cryptocurrencies have been victims to many such attacks. Billions of dollars have been lost to race conditions... And that's just the ones which were discovered. They are notoriously difficult to find post-implementation.
The programming primitives that we're using today aren't optimized to avoid race conditions or even try to encourage good concurrency patterns; quite the opposite; they encourage convenient but disorganized parallelization and they're optimized to put the focus on type safety which is a far less concerning issue. A lot of people who were rightly alarmed by gaps in schema validation (which is critical at API boundaries) became overly obsessed with type safety (which is a broader concern). I have built some async primitives for Node.js, nobody cared! NOBODY! Other developers have had the same experience with most other languages. I think only a few niche languages like Elixir actually treated it as important. But nobody even acknowledged that the problem could be remedied in existing languages. It's so bad that it seems as though some people wanted it to be that way.
The term 'concurrency safety' doesn't even exist! Some have a vague idea about thread-safety OK, that's very specific to one particular concurrency primitive... but what about the concurrency of asynchronous logic (much more common nowadays)? I have felt thoroughly suppressed in that regard in my career.
The only voice on the subject of architecture that got through to the 'mainstream' was Martin Fowler (one of the inventors of Agile software development). After that, there was Dan Abramov of Redux fame. Some notable opinionated architecture books were published but none really identified the underlying essential philosophy to good architecture.
The best, most succinct quote I ever read on the subject was from Alan Kay (inventor of OOP) who said "I'm sorry that I long ago coined the term 'objects' for this topic because it gets many people to focus on the lesser idea. The big idea is messaging."
I like that quote for many reasons; firstly because it shows wisdom, secondly, it tells you what the issue is, very simply and, thirdly, it hints at the importance of 'focus' in this discipline where we are saturated with thousands of complex overlapping and partially conflicting ideas.
I think the FP trend was somewhat of a red herring. Same with Type Safety. Yes, they were useful to some extent, there are some really good ideas in there, but people got so caught up in them that the most fundamental area of improvement was ignored entirely. To me, the core value proposition of FP can be reduced down to "pass by value is safer than pass by reference." Consider that in the context of Alan Kay's "The big idea is messaging." - Is an object reference a message? NO! A live instance is not a message! Precisely! His point supports pass-by-value, furthermore, it encourages succinct/minimal parameters.
Good architecture is rooted in 2 core concepts. 1. Loose coupling. 2. High cohesion and you achieve those by separating logic + structure from messaging. The biggest mistake people make it passing around structure and logic as parameters to other logic. You should avoid moving around logic and structure at runtime; only messages should move between objects; the simpler the messages, the better. And note that 'avoid' doesn't mean never but it means you have to be extremely careful when you do violate this principle and there should be a really good commercial reason to do so. I.e. You should exhaust other reasonable approaches first.
> only messages should move between objects
Can you provide an example for this?
nice post, lately ive been dealing with concurrency, between threads and processes. trying to keep it cross platform as well, its a lot to learn. if you have large buffers and want to keep some semblance of performance, its VERY interesting understanding all the transfer mechanisms and cache levels involved. i feel these are the sorts of things my education skipped, it was all very focused on the static structure of objects not the dynamics of data transfer.
Yeah, passing by value or "Value semantics" can prevent many programming errors. Passing references to immutable data can serve a similar purpose. In low-level languages where memory layout and calling convention map to target hardware, there are differences in performance to consider.
Pass by value would indeed make a big difference to how programs are structured and make it easier to reason about programs.
I just want to point out that "concurrency safety" is very much a word, although "thread safety" is more common. These are broadly part of memory safety, which is a topic mainly due to security concerns but also academic study.
The two perspectives are not perfectly congruent. Non-concurrency-safe languages like go can also be considered broadly memory safe. The pragmatic rationale is that data races in GCed languages are much less exploitable. From a academic, principle based view this is unsatisfying and unconvincing as one would prefer safety to be matter of semantics. See also https://www.ralfj.de/blog/2025/07/24/memory-safety.html
Rust uses "fearless concurrency" as a slogan. Rust offers more options than passing by value (Copy) while still guaranteeing safety through static type checking.
There is also research for GCed languages to establish non-interference eg Scala capture checking.
Concurrency is recognized as difficult (at least by people who are knowledgable) and programs language design usually involves pragmatic choices if you need concurrency. If the language does not provide the primitives or spec that enables safety, then you are left with patterns and architecture.
The science is still evolving, it is certainly not the case that nobody cares. Rather, progress is slow and moving ideas from research industry is even slower. How much value we ascribe to correctness, safety and performance in industry depends very much on the context.