Legacy Systems as Old Cities

Federico Mena Quintero, the co-creator of GNOME, shares his vision of how software is like cities.

Does long-lived software have the same patterns of change as cities and physical artifacts? Can we learn from the building trades and urbanism for maintaining software in the long term? Could we turn legacy software into a good legacy?

The analogy focuses on not just how any software is like any city, but on how software that have been around for a while, sometimes uncharitably called legacy software, is like old cities.

This doesn’t happen automatically, as he points out:

Like many things, real integration instead of haphazard development started to happen once money was put into GNOME. Red Hat formed a team to work exclusively on GNOME.

But once such systems cross a threshold, they start becoming like cities.

There is a long history of software which is loved enough, or useful enough, that people maintain it and slowly upgrade it to newer infrastructure.

He ends by quoting Jane Jacob (paraphrased here for length):

Being human is itself difficult, and therefore all kinds of settlements have problems, big cities moreso. But vital cities are not helpless or passive victims of circumstance, nor are they different from nature.

Dull, inert cities contain the seeds of their own destruction and little else. But lively, diverse, intense cities contain innate ability to invent what is required to combat their difficulties; they contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.