so maybe i’m not so misguided afterall. a few days ago, i professed my confusion as to why the joel was declaring the groove gang to be “mere” architectural astronauts. to me – it seems apparent that groove is playing a game with a rule that says you can’t compete with the people you are trying to sell to – namely, VARs and professional services orgs that are actually trying “…to enable things that people really need.”

well – hugh pyle, the director of technology for agora professional services, which hosts groovelog, says basically the same thing, but with a little more imagination:

“Elegant software design is all about putting together simple things in simple ways which have unpredictable – and endlessly complex – uses. The main tool in a software architect’s kitbag is abstraction. Occam’s razor. The best software designers sometimes take this to extremes (see [4], and Ray’s comment “Groove, in essence, distributes *method calls* as opposed to data” in [5]). These are the astronauts. Their “absurd, all-encompassing, high-level pictures” are really more like new building blocks, new elements. Alone these elements are pretty useless. But they’re powerful.

Now, I’m not an astronaut; I don’t even like heights. But I love synthesis: pick up two or three things and smush them together to make something new. My sort of software design – applications and systems architectures – almost never involves creating anything completely new, or anything down-to-the-metal. But when you get to put together other people’s building blocks, it’s very easy to make smart things happen. Applications which change the way a company does business. These are Agora’s stock-in-trade.”

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