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RE: Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You


astronauts work what kind of
At 08:59 AM 9/17/2002 -0700, Dare Obasanjo wrote:

> From your comments below it seems you don't read the actual contents of
>the messages on XML-DEV but instead project your own misconceptions on
>them. I haven't gotten that impression from the posts in this thread and
>from what I've seen many people have been careful to distinguish between
>the useful kind of software architects from the worse than useless kind.

I had felt that the common thread in many of these messages was "useful 
software architects are like me" and "useless software architects do 
something else, like use abstractions that I don't understand." I suspect 
each of us knows some approaches that have worked for us personally, and 
other approaches that have failed for us personally. But I don't see any 
justification for many statements like the one you yourself made when you said:

At 08:12 PM 9/14/2002 -0700, Dare Obasanjo wrote:
>When I see research/academic experience on someone's resume I don't think 
>"Hmmm, there's someone who can solve problems" instead I think "There's 
>someone who would rather spend time on politics and pontification than 
>work on shipping a working product".

Am I wrong to infer that you don't have research/academic experience on 
your resume, and that you believe people like you who don't have this kind 
of experience are the ones you need to ship a working product? I don't have 
that kind of experience on my resume either, but I have certainly worked 
with extremely productive people who do - and other people who have this 
kind of experience but don't seem to contribute much. I have had the same 
experience with people who do not have such experience.

Personally, I think that many approaches to architecture are useful, and 
most of us have a good understanding of only a few of these approaches at 
best. These approaches are found at different levels of abstraction. Some 
are inductive, others are deductive, some are top-down, others are 
bottom-up, some require significant mathematical background, others do not. 
And no matter what approach I use, a lot of my thinking comes from playing 
with the problem domain inductively, and isn't captured by any formal method.

In this whole thread, I haven't seen any real evidence that any particular 
approach is good or bad for solving any particular set of problems. We can 
point to different kinds of cars and discuss what we like or dislike about 
them, but without a comparison of different approaches to solving similar 
kinds of problems in car design, there isn't any real information to draw 
from. We can help people envision great art, then tell them that it is 
people like us that create it, not people like them....but again, there's 
no evidence either way.

But enough for now. I have to do some work on a product that is shipping 
this week ;=>

Jonathan


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