Components Serve a Larger System

"The Nike guided missile systems, the computer systems I ran, and many other aspects of the work at Bell Telephone Laboratories all taught me the facts of systems engineering—not abstractly, but in hard lessons daily illustrated by idiots who did not understand the whole as a whole, but only the components. "

Harsh take. But the same thing can be said of our addiction to components in software and design. Components exist to serve a larger system, not to satisfy our aesthetic itch to build novel component libraries.