Hello dearest readers!
This week I’ll mostly just direct you to my post in Software Archaeology. Here’s a snippet:
In a 2004 essay Martin Fowler takes inspiration from the strangler fig to propose a more progressive approach to rewrites. The strangler fig is a plant that reaches down through the boughs of existing trees, gradually constricting and suffocating them, eventually taking their place. The analogy to software is that instead of rewriting an application straight out, you begin creating a new application around the edges of the first, progressively replacing more and more until none of the original is left.
This story is charmingly human. The fig wins. The credits roll. The end. Reality is more complicated — sometimes the fig loses. Sometimes the trees live for hundreds more years, reinforced and protected from storms by the surrounding roots. Even where the fig wins, the tree has lent it its essential form — living on in structural memory.
Won’t you look at that fig! Relationship GOALS. What I didn’t mention is that sometimes multiple figs try to strangle the same tree, and when this happens they chimerically fuse into one fig plant and you can only tell the difference by testing the DNA in different places. Did I say relationship goals?
You can read more (not about figs) here.
Have a great week!
Kay