Rereading the classics: BA ch 14

This chapter is more like a summary of the beautiful architecture book. It has been an enjoyable and rewarding experience reading this book. I have learned so much from some of the greatest architectures and thought a great deal about the architectures that were not so great. One the lesson that I learned is that there is no such thing as the perfect architecture for a system. It is important to look at what exist and how people have solved similar problems before embarking on a design. Patterns are great and should be applied where applicable. This book emphasizes the importance of good architecture and as software builders we need to know that a good design is vital to the success of the product at all stages (development and support)

This chapter talks about Smalltalk, which is an interesting programming language. I did not learn much new thing in this chapter because I used Smalltalk on CS598. An interesting aspect of Smalltalk is that it is a pure object oriented language, where everything is an object and objects interact with each other only through messages. Another aspect is that the programmer must work in the smalltalk environment with the set of class libraries provided. This makes smalltalk less flexible and it is one of the reasons why it did not become very popular even if many of the concepts of smalltalk were adopted by other languages.
The conclusion of this chapter, which also like a conclusion to the book remind us again of our task as programmers. Just as programming, architecture is a matter of practice. We need to build systems that are not only beautiful, but that work. The very last sentence of the book states that very clearly: “Architecture is a chaotic adventure because beautiful architecture alone is not enough; not only beauty, but also usefulness, is the law for architecture and programming alike”