"When great thinkers ..."<p>One should give credit to Joel for correctly identifying the issue: great thinkers excel in abstract thought. Many of the comments here, however, seem to misunderstand his point about the propensity of creative minds to continue the refinement process and "not knowing when to stop". One (codeulike) apparently thinks simply being "bored" is what drives abstract thinkers. Let me assure you that is not the case, nor is it an inability to code. Many architecture astronauts started out as wiz coders.<p>Now let's review the gifts given by said astronauts - I'll limit to 2 examples but there are more:<p>- LISP is the mind product of a software astronaut.<p>- UNIX ("everything is a file") is the product of software space exploration.<p>My advice to serious young software engineers is to not accept mediocrity and imprecise thinking as acceptable standards for their chosen vocation. This cult of celebrating mediocrity in software design is a transient phase (20 years to date) and it is mostly a side effect of the introduction of facile soap boxes via the internet and blog sphere. When the dust settles, deep thinking and an ability to conceive powerful abstractions will yet again take center stage.<p>Software, after all, is all about abstraction.
Is it just me or did this not age entirely well? I really appreciate Joel’s writings, but in a kind of very specific way .Net did actually turn out to be the big deal it set out to be, along with Java. Modern spreadsheets are just message-passing machines, and somehow Messaging companies are gigantically valuable. Yes, astronauts are expensive, perhaps overcelebrated and often wrong… but somebody has to do it right!? I for one am glad we’re not still emailing Master-Spreadsheet-FINAL(1)(1).xls back and forth to get things done. I rather like millennials like Ryan Dahl that saw the potential for Javascript to be more than a browser scripting language. I may have even been something of an astronaut myself (an “idea man”… my team would jeer)- but I’ve come down to the earth and dig my hoe into the soil these days. I think we’re better off with some good astronauts out there, at least sparingly.
> When you go too far up, abstraction-wise, you run out of oxygen.<p>What happens if you don't go <i>far enough</i> up, abstraction wise?<p>You end up repeating yourself - everywhere. You end up with globals everywhere. You end up with God Classes. You end up with epic-length functions nested 15 levels deep. You end up with primitives trying to do the job that well-crafted data structures, named using the terminology of the problem domain, should be doing.<p>It's odd that the author rails against "astronauts" without addressing the very real motivations that lead to good architectures. Like all design, there are tensions in software development, and navigating the forces pulling you in opposite directions regarding architecture is one of the most important contribution you can make.<p>It's also odd that the author never calls out specific architectures that are the work of astronauts, just "the stupendous amount of millennial hype that surrounds them." He seems to hint in the introduction that CORBA is (was) one of them, but even that reference is pretty vague.
I remember being invited by IBM to some sort of lunch junket with Grady Booch (IBM had acquired Rational Software). The guy basically spouted the most inane platitudes it has ever been my misfortune to be on the receiving end of, despite my working for a company so large it had not just architects but also IT <i>Urbanists</i>.
I really agree with a lot of this.<p>I'll tell you what though, if you have a programming task that you find boring, over-engineering it and over-architecting it can make it _so_ much more enjoyable.
This is a good one. Joel Spolsky's writing has been a <i>huge</i> influence on me over the past 20 years. For anyone who liked this article but may not be familiar with his other writings: I encourage you to look at his "reading lists" (posted on <a href="https://www.joelonsoftware.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.joelonsoftware.com/</a>) for some more gems.
What is dubbed as an "architecture astronaut" is, in my opinion, a researcher in software engineering as is the work they do. Largely, software engineering and practices aren't well defined and there's a lot of ways to approach a problem. We haven't found best approaches but in many cases we've slowly began converging on some architectural approaches for applications. These are really frameworks to think of how to approach a specific type of software system, much in the way research provides foundational theory to think of work in its domain.<p>We don't think of it that way, but I personally believe that's really what it is. It's a reductionist (abstracted) approach of developing a framework around a set of observations. Just like research, it may be too far abstracted to be relevant to the problem at hand and may take years before it becomes useful. That's just my perspective, though.
“ 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!”<p>Wow, this hasn’t aged well. I always found Joel’s articles to be interesting but pretty limited in actual wisdom. He writes as if to be making profound observations, but in reality they are actually pretty narrow minded and really only apply to a very narrow nitch of computing as a whole and really only apply well to a certain startup type — not technically complex communications, productivity or organizational type software.<p>His advice is invalid for the development of anything more complex, for example you shouldn’t take his advice if you’re building a biotech company or starting a new kind of tech company that isn’t your run of the mill CRUD app.<p>I think it’s rather disingenuous and quite arrogant to make generalizations about the types of people who work at big companies (without even knowing what they do or having ever met them). I’m sure the same traits that make one have disdain for corporations are the same drivers that cause one to become an entrepreneur, and then blog loudly about it to the world.
So... I think a lot this is two problems, not one.<p>One is definitely climbing the transaction ladder to the point of no oxygen, Astronaut Architecture. But, I don't think that alone explains the amount of <i>bombastic, heroic, utopian, grandiloquence</i> of those Astronaut Architecture quotes.<p>People describing their jobs, their companies, ideas and such seem draw to grandiose & abstract nonsense. "Solutions-talk." Walk around a lot of business-ey trade shows and read plaques. 90% of the time, it is impossible to know what they do, who they do it for, why. They all do "<i>business, people, and technology solutions.</i>" Even if you stop with questions, the first answer is always hopelessly abstract. It takes a lot of digging to eventually find out they do custom spreadsheets for dentists.<p>Meaningful statements are limiting. Who wants to limit themselves?<p>Also, it works. Saying something specific enough to be meaningful opens you to criticism, being eliminated by process of elimination, etc.<p>Architecture Astronautary feeds comfortably into sales, marketing, investor relations, recruitment. It's acceptable in boardrooms, AGMs, job descriptions. Media is happy to report on it.<p>Obscurity by abstraction works.
> 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.<p>This is a very effective statement. Today p2p for music is certainly alive but has greatly been surpassed by services like YouTube and Spotify (and Rdio, sadly dead before it’s time). One is ad supported, the others paid. But they all just let the user search and listen.<p>Popcorn Time has done this for movies and tv. It’s purely p2p. Disliked by content owners, but they’ve largely failed to provide the same kind of universal search and watch functionality that the app provides. Hulu, Netflix, Apple+, Disney+, insert other streaming services. They all basically fail at usable search and recommendation usability and have limited overall content.
> 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.<p>Is is the really big company that makes you die inside or the people themselves?<p>I tend to think its the company... its soo hard for me to work and feel productive at a large company. Something just oozes nobody really cares about you or what your doing. Everyone is just trying to do the bare minimum and go home.
Premature optimisation is a real pain when it comes to software design and architecture. However, abstraction is a powerful and necessary tool that can make our life a lot easier by avoid repetition (DRY - don't repeat yourself).<p>A good architect worth their salt will be able to find the right balance. To distill and simplify a problem down to the absolute minimum where it cannot and should not be abstracted anymore before it lose or miss its core objectives and reason to exist.
Much of what Joel says here - especially the conclusion at the end - is also mirrored in what Steve Jobs said when confronted over shutting down OpenDoc: "You have to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology. You can't start with the technology and figure out where you're gonna sell it."<p><a href="https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=110" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/oeqPrUmVz-o?t=110</a>
The peer to peer part definitely didn't age well. And the Java part too.<p>Nobody likes bombastic claims, but these likely go from marketing than from architects. It's important to see beyond the marketing and recognize the engineering thinking and potential behind technologies.
"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!”"<p>Strong blockchain vibes in this and the paragraph that follows it.
well, the tragedy now compared to 2001 when Joel wrote this, is the architecture astronauts are no longer limited to big corps. with vc money, early stage startups got money to boot.
I don't know how many early stage startups, I have encountered barely out of a seed stage with microservice this, serveless this, all running of course on k8's for unlimited scaling.
if frontend was madness then current trends in backend dev are madness ^2.
I have completely switched off now from node.js work to on saner boring things.