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Comment by F_J_H | Hacker News Reader

I had not heard of "emergent architecture" until you implied you hated it, and so I thought I would Google it.

I have no idea what emergent architecture is in the agile context, but the idea of emergence is fascinating to me, and has been ever since I read "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" by Steven Johnson.

We see the idea of emergent design everywhere in nature and society. I'm not suggesting everything can be built and designed "emergently", but certainly some things can be. See the book (and concept of) "the cathedral and the bazaar". The idea of something useful coming into existence without central planning is an enticing one, and so I can see the draw.

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Thank you for that book recommendation - I just bought it and am looking forward to reading it :)

I also had not heard the term "emergent architecture" in relation to software development. I'm intimately familiar with the concept of emergent order, though, and my grokking it was part of my "political awakening" in my 20s. It led me from being a libertarian-leaning conservative to an anarcho-capitalist. To put it another way, I believe that the system create by independent actors acting in their own self-interest naturally create the most efficient system possible within the constraints of the environment within which they operate.

There's a name for this concept when applied to company management, but I can't recall it at the moment :(. I want to say the word has a Greek root, and it reminded me of "autarchy" ("self organized") but that wasn't what it was called.

You'd probably like Milton Friedman's ideas, and I'd be surprised if you've not already come across his work and YouTube lectures.

There is something to be said for small government, but also can go too far: actors acting in their own best interest can obviously cause harm to society or to the larger group as a whole (See "tragedy of the commons").

Related to emergence is rapid iteration, and it's importance to analysing complexity, which is caputured nicely in "Boyd's law". See https://blog.codinghorror.com/boyds-law-of-iteration/, and then see if you can find the referenced paper by Roger Sessions. (Sessions seemed to caputure the essence of "Lean Startup" before it was cool...)

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