General talk about software patterns

["Richard P. Gabriel" <rpg AT dreamsongs.com>]

This workshop might be of interest to you or to people you know. At 
OOPSLA. Please pass this along.

http://dreamsongs.com/Feyerabend/Breathturn2006.html

Short blurb:

Scale changes everything.

The trend in the design and development of software-intensive systems 
today is toward scale that increases in every measurable way. Lines 
of code, complexity, dependency, communication, bandwidth, memory, 
datasets, and many other measures for our systems continue to reach 
and exceed the limits of our ability to produce high-quality systems 
for all purposes.

These systems will be unbounded, integrating internet-scale 
resources. They will serve diverse stakeholders with competing 
objectives and at the same time be constrained by policy, regulation, 
and the behaviors of their users. The lines between development, 
acquisition, and operations will blur: ULS systems will not die; they 
will be too large to be replaced and will be inextricably connected 
to the day-to-day mission. Rather, they will continue to evolve over 
time with behavior often more emergent than planned. Because complete 
specifications will not be achievable, sufficient assurance will have 
to do. ULS systems present "wicked problems," ones for which each 
attempt to create a solution changes the problem. Some of these 
characteristics appear in conventional systems, but in ULS systems 
they will dominate.

                        -rpg-