Re: Development: A Structured Problem Area?

On Jun 16, 2004, at 21:38, Derek Richardson wrote:
> Don't we spec the XML parsing library, the simple templating system, 
> the
> Google web API?

Maybe. Emergence comes from simple things that can potentially be 
speced. And that's the power of it all. Take simple things, build more 
complex, unintended ones. As we lose our ability to specify more 
complex systems, that's where computing is going.

> So the authors of the components might not have foreseen the uses, but
> the programmer in Boise does. That's not emergent as I think we were
> discussing, when a piece of software exhibits emergence on its own. We
> were discussing software that is accidentally a complex adaptive 
> system.

As in Frederic Brown's "The Answer"...


Cheers

Dave



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