On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 7:10 PM, Steve Jones <[email protected]> wrote: > Whether it is individuals (Bjarne, Bertrand (Meyer), Roy or Gosling) > who come up with a new technical approach or companies who seek to > sustain the status quo the end result is fundamentally the same, there > are some great advances and the bar is raised but the day to day > building from that point remains poor.
However "poor" technology leaps are, they are infinitely better than hand-waving pseudo-architectural leaps like SOA. One guru you left off your list is Tim Berners-Lee. He started the Web, and we've all been the better for it. Same for Licklider/DARPA/BBN and the Internet. For that matter, same for Fred Brooks and OS/360. For better or worse, it is concrete technologies that move the human race "forward"; not vague "architectures". REST is to SOA as the Web is to Hypertext. There were/are lots of hypertext gurus who dreamed of perfect architectures (Ted Nelson comes to mind), but never implemented anything popular enough to move forward. TBL came along and delivered a wildly popular "dumbed-down" version of hypertext (eg no backlinks<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_link#Technical>- heresy at the time and still heresy to Ted). And the rest is history. Same goes for SOA: lots of theory, but no wildly popular technology realization -- except REST. Gall's law <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gall%27s_law> wins again: "A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. The inverse proposition also appears to be true: A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a working simple system." Read "REST" for "simple system" and "SOA" or "WS-*" for "complex system". -- Nick
