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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] What Is Extensibility? (WAS RE: overheads of pipelines)
 Is extensibility prediction? In one sense, yes it is, but in another sense, it isn't. It is the attempt to control the evolution of the space within which a technology is located by choice or accident. I had a series of emails with a blogger on the topic of prediction. His point was that the web is inherently unpredictable and that most evolutionary spaces are like that. Mine is that it is mostly predictable particularly because it is an evolutionary space, that it can be directed, (See Evolutionary Stable Strategies), and that whether one accepts it or not, the Long Tail is a tool for doing exactly that. What confuses most people is the time scale. Because of proximity effects, the near future is reasonably predictable and the far future is as well. The medium term is harder because it is difficult to know precisely when transitional phases will occur, but it is reasonably easy to know the ranges. Success in guiding it is least certain at the transitional boundary where a co-opting act creates a new species or genre. Some try to create tipping points but don't understand instability at the boundary. So if you want to future proof (and mostly one doesn't), ask if you want the code to thrive by co-opting, contaminating, or outright replacing some neighbor. Guidance from fifty thousand feet is organized but indirect. It only looks like magic because any pattern building bottom up appears to lack direction. It is directed but emergence cycles have timescales and without the timescale set properly, they look random. An evolving network is intelligence in motion. If you want to model it, model it as a transformable nested space. The space is sentient/ambient for all practical purposes. The objects in that space evolve as directed by the space. That is what makes extensibility hard because success is not predicated on the evolution of the code but on the transformation of the space. Planned extensibility attempts to control the evolution of code in motion. If you have no model you can test, don't do it. While a system may be closed and insensitive, the proximate space it is in is not. That is the essential challenge of real time control: not to damage the locals in a local timescale or to do it very precisely. A network with only one node is meaningless. len From: Rick Marshall [mailto:rjm@z...] extensibility is future proofing come back later and share stories of when you should have furure proofed, but for the moment you didn't. win today, lose tomorrow - it's a big gamble. rick Jirka Kosek wrote: > bryan rasmussen wrote: > >> 2. should one always build the most extensible application even if the >> current needs do not require extensibility - my personal opinion is >> yeah > > > I think that extreme programming folks would say "NO". > I would say "It depends". ;-) 
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