Perfect Architecture

From CanAnArchitectureEmerge: "A PerfectArchitecture has no feedback. Its like concreting in the river-bed."

Nope. Architecture, software or BuiltWorld?, grows and flexes. Stasis is not perfection. Stasis is death.

All architecture is perfect until it is actually built.

I think we are approaching 'perfect' from different angles. I didn't mean perfect in the sense of good, I meant perfect in the sense of complete. This is a static attribute. It is also a mythological beast. A good architecture, as you note, must be able to change and adapt. Indeed that is the main thrust of an emergent architecture. So I think we agree in principle even if the words are mixed up. -- RichardHenderson.

Is a PerfectArchitecture perfect because it has no feedback (and therefore cannot change), or does it have no feedback because it is perfect (no motivation for change)?

It is static. If this stasis is because a permanent stability has been reached, then that's great. If it is because it can no longer respond to feedback, then it is doomed to cause suffering sometime. The former can become the latter at the whim of fate. Often embodied as pointy-haired bosses telling you to integrate their new acquisition's mainframe accounting system, say :).-- RIH

Well okay, but there's another architecture being the architectural patterns across similar systems. It's hard to imagine stasis in that picture because it implies a time somewhere beyond the end of the world. Does PerfectArchitecture have a meaning in this higher sense?

Sorry, you've lost me. Could you expand a little?

Expanding isn't in my contract (heh).

There's a notion of architecture, called architectural style by Garlan and Shaw, that transcends any particular system. Pipe and filter architecture, for example. I guess I wrongly assumed that while a single project could achieve stasis in its product architecture, something applying as broadly as an architectural style couldn't. But now that I think of it, pipe and filter probably has achieved stasis. Not because new pipe and filter systems cease to vary from one another, but because that variation exists outside the architectural style. I think I'm repeating something you said elsewhere - "outside the framework". -- WaldenMathews

I believe styles can emerge. Indeed, how else could they come about? Where styles speciate is a toughie. Too fuzzy.

Not that they can't emerge, I take that as a given, but that they can achieve stasis, while the world around them continues to change. Approximately so. Good enough.

Yes