Big Ball of Mud

Today, I finished reading Big Ball of Mud, which is a rather long, but still worth reading article on software architecture. Everybody in the field, even good programmers, have surely seen, coped with and produced such not aesthetic solutions. The article discusses why this happen so often in practice, can we avoid this, should we ... and much more?

Having read the classic Design Patterns book and a few of the first chapters of Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community I guess I had a good basis to understand without further research most of the ideas in the article (argh, it is still a bit tough for a not-native English speakers). All those stuff about patterns and so on. And it is good to know who the f*%# Christopher Alexander is, and what he has to do with architecture and software, since there are a plenty of quotes from his books ...

One of the possible benefits of reading the article is to get used to some of the terms like "big ball of mud", "spaghetti code" etc. :) But still these are only words, and the important stuff are the concepts beneath . And for fun, one may learn some trivia as this: Where the term"Wiki" originated and what does it mean :)

So, it is good stuff, especially if taking a spoon at a time (it took me 4 days for just 34 pages), and spending a a few miuntes thinking over what's written.

Btw, if you plan to read it, I recommend printing out the MS Word version, which does not have those lame illustrations and fancy coloring as in the web page :)