day 85

digital darwinism 7: promises in an election year

Yesterday we noted that few computer products truly have an architecture. At best, software architectures are architectures gone awry. At worst, software architectures are a consequence of Darwinism. In fact, the chaotic design practices described earlier not only affect designers, but they have seeped into our entire hi-tech culture. Darwinism has infiltrated the whole computer industry, and is spreading faster than promises in an election year. Consider the hard fought battle for dominance in the "software bus architecture" arena of distributed computing. I am talking about DDE, DLE, OLE, OLE/COM, OLE/DCOM, and more recently, ActiveX from Microsoft. Microsoft is not the only villain; there are similar unruly products from the OMG CORBA/OpenDoc/SOM camps of IBM, Apple, and Oracle. My story also applies to the Unix world of DCE, NEO, WebObjects, and JavaObjects. Everyone is guilty. If any of these "architectures" were truly designed with foresight, they have subsequently succumbed to chaos. If they were part of a bigger plan, that plan has long ago disappeared. Even as you read this, these "architectures" are being cast aside in favor of even more unruly, unplanned, ad hoc "plans" for the WWW. The WWW is simply another demonstration of the triumph of chaos over order. With the latest WWW and Java craze, we are about to pile up more victims of Darwinism in the software industry.

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