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So he discovered Cox and sex about 12 years after
the last generation did. It will be fun to see
what analogies he draws.
I used Brad Cox's book extensively when
I was writing Beyond The Book Metaphor and the Enterprise
Engineering papers. The next step was ecological metaphors
because they enable the concepts of energy budgets. Software
systems barely need that but because software system
implementations always have social components, it is a
useful analogy. SoftwareICs tripped over the lack
of common object models (what Java and C# are there
to cure but...). It's no good to have a softwareIC
if the board one mounts it on isn't fit or it is
too densely populated.
A parameter list is just a microdocument where
the only consumer is software.
What is more interesting
is the process of getting agreements that the
thing named by the URI is the same thing for
all parties. All local. It is easy to designate
an interface. It is expensive to maintain it
the more specific and less applicable it becomes
but it is better for a shared real time system
if it is small and quite specific. That is
probably why the new generation working on
orchestration/choreography are ducking away
from real time requirements.
That is the conundrum of simplification and
composability, also the inverse scaling effect
of sign systems given operations. The web works
precisely because it has few verbs and they
are not coupled to the content. But I've learned
more about the problems of very large distributed
systems from distributed simulations than any
other endeavour. It really exposes the specific
problems when one is attempting to create, maintain
and update a shared virtual reality in lowest
common denominator platforms. One combines
lots of document/message types with just a few verbs
for moving them and the trickery of delayed
updates (why do the Matrix fighters freeze
in mid jump: synchronization of views).
Yes, in general given both social issues
and the energy costs of sharing interfaces for
microdocuments, it is better to move coarse
documents with rough agreements, ontological
commitment, etc. in a lattice of potential
meanings. It falls apart in real time simulations
though without a lot of trickery. Real time
latency is the bear if all viewpoints must
share provably identical values. The web is
meant to be de-synced, so it just works.
Say 'batch'.
len
-----Original Message-----
From: Rich Salz [mailto:rsalz@datapower.com]
> I wonder who will be the first to resurrect Brad Cox and
> Software ICs. Now that is a golden oldie, but closer
> to the solution than most. It leads to C#, Java and UML
> and away from declarative data objects.
Don Box is currently doing this as part of a talk about service-oriented
architecture. Services and documents are more flexible and powerful
than interfaces.
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