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February 28, 2003
Cathedrals, Patterns, and Java
One thing that irks me about the cathedral and the bazaar concept is that it's historically wrong about cathedrals. I'm sure I'm not the first person to point out that most if not all Gothic cathedrals were in fact largely bottom-up, open-source efforts. These things took hundreds of years to build, you really think they kept looking back at that one master plan? No way. Analysis of style in the buildings often shows lots of back and forth between workers desiging on the fly, on small scales. An idea that appears in one part of the structure will reappear again elsewhere, reworked and improved. It's also likely that cathedral architects, carvers, and builders travelled and worked on more than one cathedral during their lives (though many workers might have helped build the same building thier grandfathers had worked on).
This amazing talk(smallish .pdf file) by Guy Steele at a Java programming conference in 1998 mentions that in passing. Steele's talk is about language design, and itself defines a language used in the talk during the talk. And it's written mostly in words of one or two syllables. You will like it.
Posted by Andrew at February 28, 2003 12:56 PM