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April 21, 2001December 5, 2016 by Joel Spolsky

Don't Let Architecture Astronauts Scare You

  * Rock star developer, News

When great thinkers think about problems, they start to see patterns.
They look at the problem of people sending each other word-processor
files, and then they look at the problem of people sending each other
spreadsheets, and they realize that there's a general pattern:
sending files. That's one level of abstraction already. Then they go
up one more level: people send files, but web browsers also "send"
requests for web pages. And when you think about it, calling a method
on an object is like sending a message to an object! It's the same
thing again! Those are all sending operations, so our clever thinker
invents a new, higher, broader abstraction called messaging, but now
it's getting really vague and nobody really knows what they're
talking about any more. Blah.

[Charles_Ri]When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of
oxygen. Sometimes smart thinkers just don't know when to stop, and
they create these absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures of
the universe that are all good and fine, but don't actually mean
anything at all. 

These are the people I call Architecture Astronauts. It's very hard
to get them to write code or design programs, because they won't stop
thinking about Architecture. They're astronauts because they are
above the oxygen level, I don't know how they're breathing. They tend
to work for really big companies that can afford to have lots of
unproductive people with really advanced degrees that don't
contribute to the bottom line.

A recent example illustrates this. Your typical architecture
astronaut will take a fact like "Napster is a peer-to-peer service
for downloading music" and ignore everything but the architecture,
thinking it's interesting because it's peer to peer, completely
missing the point that it's interesting because you can type the name
of a song and listen to it right away.

All they'll talk about is peer-to-peer this, that, and the other
thing. Suddenly you have peer-to-peer conferences, peer-to-peer
venture capital funds, and even peer-to-peer backlash with the
imbecile business journalists dripping with glee as they copy each
other's stories: "Peer To Peer: Dead!"

[Harvard_Me] The Architecture Astronauts will say things like: "Can
you imagine a program like Napster where you can download anything,
not just songs?" Then they'll build applications like Groove that
they think are more general than Napster, but which seem to have
neglected that wee little feature that lets you type the name of a
song and then listen to it -- the feature we wanted in the first
place. Talk about missing the point. If Napster wasn't peer-to-peer
but it did let you type the name of a song and then listen to it, it
would have been just as popular.

Another common thing Architecture Astronauts like to do is invent
some new architecture and claim it solves something. Java, XML, Soap,
XmlRpc, Hailstorm, .NET, Jini, oh lord I can't keep up. And that's
just in the last 12 months!

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with these architectures... by no
means. They are quite good architectures. What bugs me is the
stupendous amount of millennial hype that surrounds them. Remember
the Microsoft Dot Net white paper? 

    The next generation of the Windows desktop platform, Windows.NET
    supports productivity, creativity, management, entertainment and
    much more, and is designed to put users in control of their
    digital lives.

That was about 9 months ago. Last month, we got Microsoft Hailstorm.
That white paper says:

    People are not in control of the technology that surrounds
    them....HailStorm makes the technology in your life work together
    on your behalf and under your control.

Oh, good, so now the high tech halogen light in my apartment will
stop blinking randomly.

Microsoft is not alone. Here's a quote from a Sun Jini whitepaper:

    These three facts (you are the new sys admin, computers are
    nowhere, the one computer is everywhere) should combine to
    improve the world of using computers as computers -- by making the
    boundaries of computers disappear, by making the computer be
    everywhere, and by making the details of working with the
    computer as simple as putting a DVD into your home theater
    system.

And don't even remind me of the fertilizer George Gilder spread about
Java:

    A fundamental break in the history of technology...

That's one sure tip-off to the fact that you're being assaulted by an
Architecture Astronaut: the incredible amount of bombast; the heroic,
utopian grandiloquence; the boastfulness; the complete lack of
reality. And people buy it! The business press goes wild!

Why the hell are people so impressed by boring architectures that
often amount to nothing more than a new format on the wire for RPC,
or a new virtual machine? These things might be good architectures,
they will certainly benefit the developers that use them, but they
are not, I repeat, not, a good substitute for the messiah riding his
white ass into Jerusalem, or world peace. No, Microsoft, computers
are not suddenly going to start reading our minds and doing what we
want automatically just because everyone in the world has to have a
Passport account. No, Sun, we're not going to be able to analyze our
corporate sales data "as simply as putting a DVD into your home
theatre system."

[Harvard_Sc]Remember that the architecture people are solving
problems that they think they can solve, not problems which are
useful to solve. Soap + WSDL may be the Hot New Thing, but it doesn't
really let you do anything you couldn't do before using other
technologies -- if you had a reason to. All that Distributed Services
Nirvana the architecture astronauts are blathering about was promised
to us in the past, if we used DCOM, or JavaBeans, or OSF DCE, or
CORBA.

It's nice that we can use XML now for the format on the wire.
Whoopee. But that's about as interesting to me as learning that my
supermarket uses trucks to get things from the warehouse. Yawn.
Mangos, that's interesting. Tell me something new that I can do that
I couldn't do before, O Astronauts, or stay up there in space and
don't waste any more of my time.

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About the author.

In 2000 I co-founded Fog Creek Software, where we created lots of
cool things like the FogBugz bug tracker, Trello, and Glitch. I also
worked with Jeff Atwood to create Stack Overflow and served as CEO of
Stack Overflow from 2010-2019. Today I serve as the chairman of the
board for Stack Overflow, Glitch, and HASH.

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