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by Bill de hÓra.
Original Post: It's called software for a reason
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There are a few things in life I have done that are or were remotely like building software systems: Gardening Farming Oil painting Cooking Raising children This is counter to much orthodox thinking, and that is troubling. To be honest it's not what I expected starting out. Nor are these stock for juicy metaphors. I appreciate that the current metaphors have much more cachet - try going into a boardroom are describe what you're going to be to doing as gardening rather than architecting. But, the disciplines we look to for metaphorical inspiration are racing headlong to become 'soft', to transcend their physical limitations. As Ralph Johnston pointed out, there are real difficulties in altering a bridge or any physical thing after its been made - theoretically no such difficulties exist in software. Many of them use computers and buy our software just for that purpose, most notably for simulation, and they are I think dissatisfied with our ability to give them the softness they want. Whereas we seem to be desperately hungry for a physics, any kind of hardness. It's the oddest thing. Programming seems problematic, because it seems impossible to control. So - more process, more architecture, more tools, in the hope someday that programming will simply disappear in a puff of abstract modelling. I've talked about demonizing programming before as being a bad idea. It's like a physicist hating physics because he sees wave functions everywhere, and wills them into particles by writing down equations. Maybe that's not good architecture thinking in some people's books - sorry but I can't begin to talk about software architecture without taking programming and development into consideration. I don't think there's any getting away from practice....
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