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Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

• To: Mike Champion <mc@x...>, XML Dev <xml-dev@l...>
• Subject: Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
• From: Paul Prescod <paul@p...>
• Date: Tue, 17 Sep 2002 08:06:17 -0700
• References: <6EBGE07JDHFNMGDV07SQB7KIZTHBGE.3d861b53@MChamp>
• User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826

Mike Champion wrote:
> ...
> 
> I think that's a good list.  It reminds me of how URLs, HTTP, and HTML
> -- three relatively uninteresting designs on their own, but with
> great "emergent properties" together -- formed the foundation for the Web.

Anyone who met Tim B-L in 1989 would have called him an architecture 
astronaut just as they do today.

http://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html

 > ...
> Joel Sapolsky's rhetorical excesses aside, I think his point needs
> to be carefully considered.  The architecture of products we use
> year in/year out tend to evolve from the experiments of individual
> craftpeople rather than being handed down by the Intelligent Designer.
> "Architecture" can be the art and science of figuring out the 
> enduring principles of things that actually work, rather than
> building abstractions that can live only in the rarefied air of
> pure thought.

I don't think that it is as simple as that. Some coherent architectures 
do emerge as a package from a single person or small team. Examples 
include the WIMP interface, the original Web, the Lisp programming 
language. Of course all of these have been incrementally extended since 
then.

  Paul Prescod

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• References:
  • Re: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You
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