Sun Labs Perspectives Series Essay PS-2006-6

On System Design

January 23, 2007 - What follows is a slightly edited version of an essay I wrote for the 2006 Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA) conference which Richard Gabriel urged me to consider submitting to the essays track of the conference. I agreed to write something well before I knew what I would be writing about. What intrigued me about the task was the thought of using the essay form, which allows the author to insert opinion and personal observation, as a way of exploring a subject that did not seem to lend itself to the more impersonal form of a conference paper.

In writing an essay, I am always aware of skating on the thin line between capturing something worth saying and simply pontificating. I hope that I have stayed to the useful side of that line, and apologize for those places where I have crossed it. Much in this essay is borrowed or stolen from others, and I try to indicate the heavy influence people like Fred Brooks and Ivan Sutherland have had on my thinking in this area.

The subject of the essay, System Design, is one that as a profession we talk about less than I believe we should. System Design is, in many ways, the most important and most difficult thing that we as engineers attempt to do. I believe that we avoid talking about it because it is hard, and seems somehow "unscientific."

There are clearly some designs that are good and others that are not. But the judgment of how good a design is often seems subjective or based on aesthetic principles rather than on the cold hard facts that we as engineers pride ourselves as forming the basis for all that we do. I hope that this essay convinces some readers that the dichotomy between science and art or engineering and aesthetics is not clear, required, or even desirable. What we do must be grounded in fact, but it also needs to be grounded in taste. We should revel in that rather than trying to cover it up. It makes what we do more difficult, but also much more interesting.

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