Software Architecture in Practice, Second Edition

Chapter 19. Software Architecture in the Future

Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future.

—Niels Bohr

The history of programming can be viewed as a succession of ever-increasing facilities for expressing complex functionality. In the beginning, assembly language offered the most elementary of abstractions: exactly where in physical memory things resided (relative to the address in some base register) and the machine code necessary to perform primitive arithmetic and move operations. Even in this primitive environment programs exhibited architectures: Elements were blocks of code connected by physical proximity to one another or knitted together by branching statements or perhaps subroutines whose connectors were of branch-and-return ...