Comments on: In praise of architecture astronauts

By: John Price

John Price — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:21:56 +0000

I think you’ve made a false dichotomy between the extremes of “Astronauts” and “Pedestrians” and then concluded that since we need at least *some* abstraction to make anything useful, Astronauts are the way to go. Fortunately, there’s a whole range of options between the the two.

There aren’t “two ways for an Astronaut to approach XML”: by the definition of an Astronaut, they’ll approach it the bad way. It’s the people that occupy that middle ground between the Astronauts and the Pedestrians that will approach it in a “good” way and produce something useful.

By: UpToEleven.ca » Architecture Fighter Pilots

UpToEleven.ca » Architecture Fighter Pilots — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 16:06:39 +0000

[…] The other day, I came across a post entitled “In Praise of Architecture Astronauts“, suggesting that the alternative is Architecture Pedestrians. Where Architecture Astronauts live up in space in the ISS (Ivory Space Station) working on heady abstractions and generalizing to the nth degree, Architecture Pedestrians have their feet stuck tightly to the ground, never daring to generalize past the first level, keeping themselves firmly rooted in practical matters. You can’t write good software without abstractions, so Astronauts must be better than Pedestrians, right? […]

By: lb

lb — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 03:15:40 +0000

“generic tree markup”

yep — that there is the goodness. i like your conclusion!

By: Eliot Kimber

Eliot Kimber — Fri, 05 Jan 2007 16:42:30 +0000

I will second Uche’s comments: I think you’ve stated it exactly right: it’s about generic trees, not syntax.

By: Uche Ogbuji

Uche Ogbuji — Thu, 04 Jan 2007 19:50:45 +0000

Bravo, Solomon. In my opinion you landed a knock-out blow to put this one to sleep. I thought Dare’s post was terribly overstated. For one thing JSON folks are also always trying to compare their *format* to XML, and so by Dare’s reasoning they are also missing the point and JSON too has too many architecture astronauts. In the end, every technology choice builds on warfare between architecture astronauts and pedestrians, because sometimes the As have it (e.g. Web and P2P as you illustrate), and sometimes the Ps (e.g. Wiki vs CMS to pick a random example). And most of us are As in one case and Ps in another. Seems commonsense to me, but nevertheless thanks for
arguing the point so graciously.