Amen

On Sat, Dec 12, 2020 at 9:02 PM Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
wrote:

>     > From: "Theodore Y. Ts'o"
>
>     > Having a clean architecture is useful in so far as it makes reduces
>     > maintenance overhead and improves reliability.
>
> I would put it differently, hence my aphorism that: "the sign of great
> architecture is not how well it does the things it was designed to do, but
> how
> well it does things you never imagined it would be used for".
>
> I suppose you could say that reducing maintenance and improving reliability
> are examples of the natural consequences of that, but to me those are
> limited
> special cases of the more general statement. My sense is that systems
> decline
> over time because of what I call 'system cancer': as they are modified to
> do
> more and more (new) things, the changes are not usually very cleanly
> integrated, and eventually one winds up with a big pile. (Examples of this
> abound; I'm sure we can all think of several.)
>
>         Noel
>
>