
Why We Should Let the Pantheon Crack - gbaygon
http://nautil.us/issue/24/error/why-we-should-let-the-pantheon-crack
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gumby
Actually is worth a read. A couple of choice quotes:

“There’s no greater definition of success for a building than it’s been
standing for 20 centuries.”

It's basically a discussion of understanding (or not) old systems, patching
old implementations,and how the quest for the new _can_ (doesn't have to) lead
you astray.

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webmaven
An analogy would be to notice that a COBOL mainframe app wasn't RESTful, and
building a VM and dependency injection framework for COBOL that would make up
for this lack (rather than sandboxing the app in an environment that could
have RESTful interfaces it's boundaries).

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webmaven
Missing from the article is any discussion of survivorship bias.

At least some of the resilience of these monuments is due to the fact that we
are only studying the extant examples, which simply haven't collapsed, and so,
tautologically, exhibit positive qualities that prevent (or avoid) collapse.

This isn't random, of course, so the longer a building has survived the longer
it is likely to continue surviving.

We don't see around us the many buildings, built using the very same
principles, that did collapse.

Certainly there is much to be learned by studying the survivors, but giving
all of the credit to the skill of the designers and the principles they used
seems like an attribution error.

