Nature seems to have worked out how to both elaborate and depart without employing architects. Keep an eye on Brian Marick as he redefines clean and simple for a new age.
nh.oddly-influenced.dev · AboutIn late 2023, I did a series of podcast episodes on ecological and embodied cognition. (Start here, even though that episode is marked as optional. Note that all episodes have transcripts.) In the last episode, I identified “Illinois-style design”, which is biased toward creating data structures or classes that are faithful representations of the program’s domain. In iterative/incremental design, Illinois style refactors toward… a design that feels right, where “feels right” is some (I’d argue) semi-intuitive, semi-learned combination of “elegance”’; a resemblance to the abstractions used in fields we envy, particularly math and physics; a “shape” that seems likely to support making more changes like the ones the app has already undergone; and – frequently – some kind of faithful mapping to part of the app’s environment.