Let me try to explain to you, what to my taste is characteristic for all intelligent thinking. It is, that one is willing to study in depth an aspect of one's subject matter in isolation for the sake of its own consistency, all the time knowing that one is occupying oneself only with one of the aspects. - Edsger W. Dijkstra

The core of Dikstra's message is, that the problem areas of a program must be separated from each other — this is exactly what we have been doing with object-oriented programming and by separating the UI from the program logic.

*When you write a software module, you want to make sure that when changes are requested, those changes can only originate from a single person, or rather, a single tightly coupled group of people representing a single narrowly defined business function. You want to isolate your modules from the complexities of the organization as a whole, and design your systems such that each module is responsible (responds to) the needs of just that one business function.

[..in other words..] Gather together the things that change for the same reasons. Separate those things that change for different reasons. -* Robert "Uncle Bob" C. Martin