How websites learn

Steven Garrity's extracted some lessons for web developers from Stewart Brand's How Buildings Learn:

The next time you go to build something “quick and dirty” or do an ugly hack on an existing system, remind yourself that this code will probably live on far longer than you may intend.

This seems true in all aspects of programming--thinking back to Y2K--and yet is so frequently forgotten when we focus solely on the current project goals (rather than, say, the overall lifecycle of the application/website/whatever). Movable Type is a great example of a web application that has "learned"--mainly through a smart plug-in architecture--over the years. But it seems only uncommonly disciplined programmers actually develop that way.