Re: Artistically creative expression has no role in software design

From: Richard Riehle (adaworks_at_earthlink.net)
Date: 08/09/04 

Date: Mon, 09 Aug 2004 16:14:35 GMT

"Hyman Rosen" <hyrosen@mail.com> wrote in message
news:W%3Lc.24894$F8.17744@nwrdny02.gnilink.net...
>
> Who said anything about beauty? I was sarcastically noting that office
> buildings and bridges are in fact almost never identical, even though
> their functions are essentially simple - one contains offices and the
> other spans waterways.
>
This observation is correct at one level of abstraction. When one
takes an architectural view, it looks a little different.

One of the key ideas in software engineering is that of "levels of
abstraction." This is a fundamental property of derived types
(classes) in object-oriented programming, or object modeling.

Although each building is different, there are architectural
similarities for most buildings. The construction materials
are different, the height is different for each instance, the
number of doors and windows (if any) are different, but
the underlying functionality, across a given domain, is
likely to be similar.

This architectural view mainifests itself in a large number of
day-to-day artifacts. For some of those artifacts, the
fundamental architecture has not changed in hundreds
of years.

I don't believe I need to give a list of examples since
my assertion would seem to be self-evident.

Richard Riehle

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