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Depends on what you understand monolithic to mean. Yes, all software is a
mashup. I use monolithic to mean that that mashup has been tightly coupled
and integrated in one complex UI. There are many people who not only prefer
to do their entire job in one window, but insist that it is the hallmark of
a mature tool. Basically, they don't think any authoring tool is mature
unless it looks and feels like Microsoft Word.
To me, that is desktop thinking. But we are dealing with a generation that
grew up on the desktop.
In many ways the post-desktop world does look very similar to the
pre-desktop world, which does make it easy to dismiss it as a throwback
rather than as progress. But the desktop world was really shaped by the fact
that small cheap computers proliferated before cheap connectivity was
available. It forced computing from its natural environment on the network
onto the strange small world of the desktop.
The Web has liberated us from that strange small world, but that strange
small world has been home for so long that we still have trouble thinking
outside its confines or working outside its modes.
This is perhaps part and parcel of why we still have a hard time thinking in
terms of hypertext. The book is the paper equivalent of the desktop
computer.
Mark
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+mbaker=analecta -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+mbaker=analecta -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On Behalf
Of Robert Lauriston
Sent: Friday, July 29, 2016 1:46 PM
To: TECHWR-L Writing <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com>
Subject: Re: Book on Modern Technical Writing
Modern applications are not monolithic. They're mashups of various
open-source components with some proprietary magic sauce worth paying for
running on clusters of commodity VMs run by Amazon or Google.
In one sense, the complexity continues to increase. In another sense, things
become simpler, because the interoperation of the open-source building
blocks can increasingly be taken as a given and managed at an ever higher
level. Instead of configuring a UNIX server from scratch you can just spawn
a VM with the stack you need from an online library of images, or spawn a
whole cluster into a Docker Datacenter.
On Fri, Jul 29, 2016 at 10:19 AM, <mbaker -at- analecta -dot- com> wrote:
> Yes, there are those who see the modern and the futuristic as
> consisting of ever more complex monolithic systems. And there are
> those who see the modern and the futuristic as consisting of small pieces
loosely joined. ...
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