It is interesting. I think it's also asinine and arrogant.

The main analogy is shallow and breaks down immediately. The architecture of 200 years ago isn't kept around because it's so good but because it's historical and would be expensive to replace. The great cathedrals are really quite useless for anything but praying. And the architecture of today is so artificially constrained by the kinds of ideas that he's recommending that nothing new or interesting is being done, or is even legal to try. A few great bridges, corporate towers, and public works aside, we're in the dark ages of architecture.

We're also not talking about buildings, we're talking about the evolution of what can be built. Bricks can make a long lived building (out of earthquake zones) and a decent boat if you know how but they make lousy airplanes and worse spaceships and even more terrible surgical instruments.

The managed ecosystem argument also falls flat. For about two hundred years, oddly enough, humans have been purposely introducing species and interfering with natural wild-fire cycles in an attempt to improve ecological situations. Almost all, damaging failures. The best thing to do with an ecosystem if you want it to thrive is to leave it alone.

Trying to engineer standards for 200 years from now by introducing an open source bureaucracy at least has one of the great Perl qualities: Hubris. In this case I'd say it's a guaranteed recipe for a fall. We don't need more boxes to shoe-horn ideas into, we need to keep openness and freedom to throw ideas into the fray.

In reply to Re: (OT): 200-year software by Your Mother
in thread (OT): 200-year software by dragonchild

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