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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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