Half of this thread is unfortunate terminological noise, but phk did specify what he means by "cathedral" – software governed by a coherent design vision – and Windows and Office are not only not that, they are the poster children for not that.

The words "cathedral" vs. "bazaar" have obviously gotten too vague for people to meaningfully argue about. But "coherent design vision" has a much clearer meaning, and an enormously important one.

I think the pendulum is bound to swing back from incoherent, hypercomplex software, because at some point the reductio that we've got today simply won't be able to adapt. Who knows what will trigger that, or when. But intelligent people will always care about simplicity, beauty, efficiency, and the other qualities that come from good design. And among the ignorant programmers there are more than a few whose eyes light up when they are finally exposed to good design, and want to learn to work that way. I'm an example. So there's no point of no return here.

Once again, you're veering into "No True Cathedral" territory here.

The UNIX design philosophy -- small utilities loosely joined into a coherent whole -- is a coherent vision for a platform, under the definition you've repeated. And the Microsoft Office design philosophy, if what you're saying is true, is a bazaar because it's "incoherent."

If the UNIX ecosystem is a Cathedral and the Windows ecosystem is a Bazaar, I think we can safely say that you're not using the words that way the classic essay used them, and that the definitions you're using are malleable enough that any argument about aesthetics could bend and twist them into synonyms for "stuff I like" and "stuff that annoys me."

Well, as I meant my comment to convey, I don't think "cathedral" and "bazaar" are well defined, so most of the disagreement in this thread is just crosstalk. We can argue about what the original essay meant, but I don't find that very interesting. Software design on the other hand interests me very much. I don't have any problem provisionally accepting phk's definition of "cathedral" in order to hear his thoughts about design, most of which strike me as sensible.

So a "cathedral" must be "coherent" to be a true Scotsman?

Coherency cannot be measured, and it's extremely subjective. The *nix world can be extremely coherent: for example, you'll always find libtool, whether you want it or not, and your '70s-like filesystem layout. Isn't that "coherent" with its history?

This is not true even of Android and iOS, the modern wonderchildren he cheers on: a quick look at the Android filesystem hierarchy will show its adherence to outdated conventions (etc?) and incoherent repetition (sys? system?), and I bet you'd find something similar in iOS. So there might be a "coherent vision" behind, but the practice is quite incoherent; and mind, we're talking about very basic OSs that delegate any but the most basic functionality to third party apps. I'm happy to bet that in 10 years, the Android codebase will be as shitty and crufty as any Unix.

The truth is that a cathedral, in phkamp's rant, is "software that can all fit in one's head". For all operating systems, we're well past the stage where a single genius architect could envision the totality of a massive cathedral, for a number of reasons (time, working culture, legacy tech etc). Clearly phkamp, being more intelligent than most, only just passed that threshold with the very latest FreeBSD release, and felt the urge to tell the world.

I honestly can't tell what you're trying to say. (Other than the last bit, and that part is needlessly noxious.)

"Software that can fit in one's head" and "coherent design vision" are closely related things. I'm in favor of both. If you're saying we're past the point where that's feasible in real-world systems, that's just assuming the conclusion – the wrong conclusion, in my view.