I stumbled on a quote today by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, the famous aviator and author of The Little Prince which I think describes good software architecture. Here's the quote:

A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

Software architecture, in my experience, is about having a passion for obscuring complexity in favor of simplicity. Apple knows this at the macro level, for sure. I wonder if they really know that down to the smallest turtle that they can perceive. I don't think so. But they are further along than most. Juval Löwy often says, "For the beginning software architect, there are many choices. For the master, there are but few." This quote expresses the same sentiment as de Saint-Exupéry's thought. Perfection in the design of anything can only be achieved when the designer is willing to strip the thing to it's essentials. Then the creation becomes a tool that will resonate with the craftsman that uses it.

At the risk of making this look like an IDesign plug, Michele Leroux Bustamante says in her Learning WCF book, "Little SOA enables Big SOA." Great book, by the way. She could not be more on target. It really is turtles all the way down. Elegance in software design at any level begets more elegance. There are few right ways of doing things and when you do them consistently at all levels of your design, you can approach perfection.

Is perfect software really achievable? Perhaps. I know that when I wrote scads of assembly language code decades ago, I achieved absolute perfection for one or two algorithms. But nowadays, I think that many people use SOA as a crutch, a tool for hiding imperfections in their designs. We wouldn't scramble to building façades all the time if this weren't true. WCF helps because it strips away so much of what Juval calls "the plumbing", allowing for a level of abstraction in the delivery of information that was previously difficult to attain. It's an exciting time to be a software architect.