Root Cause of Architectural Thinking

Dogma replaces it and superstition and myth and questioning those things is probably the only way forward for architecture.

We're going completely off script here, but I can't help but ask you, do you think that part where you said in the architecture you need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable, do you think that's the creative part of the job versus the craft part of the job, which is the algorithms, logical thinking, etc.? ? Or is there no place for sort of creativity? This is science and we need to just be rigid and all.

Yeah, I really hate the cliche that people say programming or architecture is an art and a science, because to me, that's just more fluff.

I think that what I'm saying is that we need to have this rigid, critical thinking, logical thinking.

You cannot work with code without that.

It's impossible.

But when it comes to the business context, the area around the software, the people and the markets and the competitors and all of that stuff, rigid logical thinking will just get you hurt because you'll try to reduce those environments to something, you're reducing things that can't be reduced.

And when you reduce things, you miss things.

And when you miss things, your software breaks.

And that's the history of our industry, more or less.

And so to the rigid thinker, the person who's able to abandon logic and work with the business context, complex as it is, and is able to roll with the punches, that's able to anticipate some of the things that might change without entirely knowing why.

who's able to use a mixture of speculation and common sense to figure out where this system might move, which becomes instinct, as you said, gut feeling in almost all senior architects, to the rigid logical thinker.

That appears like magic.

It appears like creativity is just a word we put on it.

And so part of what I've been trying to do is say, what is this creativity? What is this thing that allows me and other senior architects to cope with this complex context? But some people, especially the more rigid thinkers among us, tended to collapse at this point and can't cope with it.

And we call it creativity.

And it is creative.

And you'll find that they're very, very creative people.

They're imaginative and usually fun people who can do this.

But there's something else going on.

Creativity is a very loose word to describe what we see.

And it doesn't help us to teach architects, because that's been my major mission in all of this.

How do I teach architects? How do I teach the next generation of architects? make them creative is not useful advice because nobody actually knows how to do that.

And so we need something else.

We need to go beyond this art and science idea of software engineering and say, what do we mean by art? What is it that makes us successful at this? firing a trebuchet at a village was an art until Isaac Newton came along and said, actually, you know, there's something else going on here.