Tuesday, January 27, 2009

Bruce Eckel on Grass Farming

Update : (Hat-tip Folknology) Michael Pollan talk at TED

Update 2 : I wonder, actually, if "grass farming" could be the new "pattern languages"?

What I mean is, patterns gave us a new way of thinking about the architecture of large software systems, and in particular thinking about their dynamics.

It seems that if we take the idea of grass-farming seriously, we're really talking about understanding the symbiotic relationships between species (and lets translate that to software-systems / agents) and finding ways to tune the interactions between them for improved performance (or resilience if that's what we prefer).

It's a bold but simple metaphor which I think inspires a lot of productive thinking. Perhaps not as rich as Alexander's work, but still a powerful idea to muse on. And I can imagine people starting to document the various symbiotic interdependencies using patterns.

Friday, January 16, 2009

Dave Winer back on Instant Outlining.

Would certainly be interesting if there was some movement on this. And some development of the OPML outliner in this direction.
Ian Bicking on Python and Woonerf. A new pattern?

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

This is possibly the best StackOverflow thread ever (on the quirks of Python closures)