My thinking has been going the other way for some time now. I see the problem
as the need to build bigger systems than any individual can currently imagine.
The real value from computers isn't just collecting the input from a single
person, but rather 'combining' the inputs from huge groups of people.
It's that ability to unify and harmonize our collective knowledge that
gives us a leg up on being able to rationalize our rather over-complicated
world.
The problem I see with components, partically a small set of large ones, is
that as the size of a formal system increases, the possible variations explode.
That is, if we consider a nearly trival small set of primitives, there are
several different possible decompositions. As the size of the system grows, the
number of decompositions grows probably exponentially or better. Thus as we
walk up the levels of abstraction to something higher, there becomes a much
larger set of possibilities. If what we desire is beyond any individuals
comprehension, and there is a huge variance in the pieces that will get
created, then we'll run into considerable problems when we try to bring all
of these pieces together. That I think is esentially where we are currently.
My sense of the problem is to go the other way. To make the peices so trivial
that they can be combined easily. It may sound labour intensive to bring it all
together, but then we do have the ability of computers themselves to spend
endless hours doing mundane chores for us. The trick then would be to engage as
many people as possible in constructing these little pieces, then bring them
all together. In a design sense, this is not substantally different than the
Internet, or Wikipedia. These both grew organically out of relatively small
pieces with minimal organization, yet somehow converged on an end-product that
is considerably larger than any individual's single effort.
Paul.
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