Here’s a transcript of an e-mail I sent to one of my students, who asked input for a presentation on the topic ‘Why do we need software architecture’. It may be a no-brainer to some, irrelevant or uninteresting to others, but I feel this is a nice summary to use as a starting point for explaining the need for architecture.

Thanks to the people behind the SE News newsletter I came across the announcement of the book 97 Things Every Architect Should Know, to be published by O’Reilly early 2009. The site looks a bit sloppy, it’s a badly formatted Wiki, but if you take your time you can find little gems like the one below.

Bill Gates had this to say in a 2005 interview with Jon Udell:

Key to my work, and to the translated articles I’m publishing here is the TOP model. I’ll elaborate more on this later, but here’s a short description of the underlying idea of the model.

Abstraction came back to mind recently, when I tried some first experiments with a fenomenon that’s been around for a while - Domain Specific Modeling. Creating a domain modeling language, based on real life concepts for a domain and generating code directly from models created in that language gives a whole new meaning to ‘using abstraction to make things easier’. This is in line with Simonyi. I promised to get back to this, and I guess now I am - Domain Specific Modeling is very much kin to the software factories he first defined at Microsoft.

The following is a musing on the concept of abstraction - I’ll be refining it over time…