Intellectual Creation

Pieces of software are intellectual creations. The fact that they are expressed in text (the source code) doesn’t make them physical, they still consist of concepts, of metaphysical entities that relate to each other and interact together in a play.

When you read for instance a novel, it evokes something in your mind. When you write a novel, you record something in your mind, with the intention of evoking it in the minds of everyone who will read it.

Physical things, such as buildings, indeed often suggest things beyond just being shelter. But they are different because they are physical. You can take them in in their entirety, you can see how they extend in the three dimensions. This highlights the fact that the physicality and whatever feelings it evokes belong to different layers, and that the physicality is objective, it looks essentially the same to everyone who look at them, whereas the emotional dimension is subjective.

Novels live entirely in the subjective dimension. As do source code. Because the design of a piece of software is an intellectual creation, it will be perceived differently by everyone who read the text, the source code.

Whenever you create something physical, whether you are cooking a meal, doing improvements to your house, repairing your bike, there’s a relatively short feedback loop. Adaptation happens more quickly. But it’s far more difficult with intellectual creations. They escape. Feedback is less immediate and it doesn’t happen by itself. You need to create the conditions for rapid and high-quality feedback to take place.

Because intellectual creations are elusive, you need support to be able to grasp them in their entirety. Therefore I believe that metaphors are necessary. By modeling software designs on something familiar that serves as a metaphor, I believe that the chance is greater that everybody see roughly the same thing, and that it’s easier to see the system, in your head, as a whole.

(The above was from some notes I wrote, on page xv, when reading The Timeless Way of Building by Christopher Alexander.)