Pyramids and cathedrals

Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves. -- Alan Kay

An analogy to these programs of the sixties is a dog house. If you take any random boards, nail, and hammer; pound them together and you've got a structure that will stay up. You don't have to know anything, except how to pound a nail to do that. Now, somebody could come along and look at this dog house and say, Wow! If we could just expand that by a factor of a hundred we could make ourselves a cathedral. It's about three feet high. That would give us something thirty stories high, and that would be really impressive. We could get a lot of people in there. The carpenters would set to work blowing this thing up by a factor of a hundred. Now, we all know, being engineers and scientists, that when you blow something up by a factor of a hundred, its mass goes up by a factor of a million, and its strength, which is mostly due to cross sections of things, only goes up by a factor of ten thousand. When you blow something up [by] a factor of a hundred, it gets by a factor of hundred weaker in its ability, and in fact, what will happen to this dog house; it would just collapse into a pile of rubble. Then there are two choices you can have when that happens. The most popular one is to say, Well, that was what we were trying to do all along. [Laughter] Put more garbage on it, plaster it over with limestone, and say, Yes, we were really trying to do pyramids, not gothic cathedrals. That, in fact accounts for much of the structure of modern operating systems today. [Laughter and applause]

Or, you can come up with a new concept, which the people who started getting interested in complex structures many years ago did. They called it architecture. Literally, the designing and building of successful arches. A non-obvious, a non-linear interaction between simple materials to give you non-obvious synergies, and a fast multiplication of materials. It's quite remarkable to people when I tell them that the amount of material in Chartres cathedral, which is an enormous, physical structure, is less than the amount of material that was put into the Parthenon. The reason is that it's almost all air, and almost all glass. Everything is cunningly organized in a beautiful structure to make the whole have much more integrity than any of its parts. That's the other way you can go, and part of the message of OOP was, that, as complexity starts becoming more and more important, architecture's always going to dominate material [...] -- still Alan Kay

Let's choose between building pyramids or gothic cathedrals, by choosing to model behavior into piles of lines of code or into the web of messages that objects send to each other.