So what you're saying is that projects such as going from remitting information in form ICD-9 to form ICD-10 in the healthcare and health insurance industry in the US should have involved no programming at all, because software developers should have foreseen the need to switch from a few hundred simple condition codes to several thousand codes in a new recursive data format? A new data format whose printed specification manual is over five inches thick and costs $1500?
If you're handling changes like that in a basic configuration file, then your powers of foresight are far beyond anyone in the entire healthcare industry. It was a months-long project most places to handle the new standard properly.