From: John Regehr (regehr@cs.utah.edu)
Date: Tue Jan 02 2001 - 10:07:42 PST
On Tue, 2 Jan 2001, Robert S. Thau wrote:
> Hmmm... when thinking about the actual structure of urban life, I
> think I got a bit more out of Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great
> American Cities.
On the relationship between architecture and software architecture: I
recently read Stewart Brand's _How Buildings Learn_. It's a wonderful
book about the effects of time and continued inhabitation on structures.
He put together some great sequences of photographs of buildings taken
years or decades apart - it makes me wish there were a way to do
something similar for software. (Imagine what Windows 2000 would look
like: a massive, reasonably modern structure but with most parts
connected to most other parts, and with a wing containing an evil nest
of Windows 3.1 assembly code...) Anyway, the books ends up as a plea
for durable, maintainable, and adaptable architecture, and it can be
read as talking about software as much as buildings.
A while ago the Half Price Books in Bellevue WA had a stack of copies of
this book for less than $10...
John
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