Re: books on programming

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From: Dave Long (dl@silcom.com)
Date: Mon Jan 08 2001 - 12:56:35 PST


> On the relationship between architecture and software architecture: I
> recently read Stewart Brand's _How Buildings Learn_.

One thing that grabbed me from HBL was that Brand not only
identified a hierarchy of timescales over which buildings
change (from furniture - mobilia - moving most frequently
to lot lines - ranchos - staying stable over centuries),
but also noted that, at least at the frequent end of the
spectrum, the most likely change was to "back the way it
was before". Looking at programming, that really struck
a chord: we spend an awful lot of time and energy moving
functionality around between hardware and software, data
and code, centers and periphery, etc. only to progress by
moving it back again as the underlying tides of tradeoffs
ebb and flow.

-Dave

(I don't recall that we ever did get a definition of
conservative in the earlier thread; perhaps we can use
a caching analogy, saying that a conservative believes
in high locality, and hence wants to keep entries wired
in the culture cache, whereas a progressive believes in
changing references, and hence will prefer speculative
prefetching over even recently used entries?)


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