It is actively harmful to teach students that software architecture is something that somehow arises from diagrams or that those kinds of silly pictures capture anything important about it. Powerful architectures come out of powerful ideas that in turn come from accumulated hard work of many people in different disciplines. One can learn much more from walking through the actual source code of some classic projects a…
Here's an addition to the answers from the others -- I'm one of the authors of the post. Thanks for your feedback. Perhaps we did not sufficiently emphasize it in the blog post, but we do tell the students about strong existing architectures, open source as well as from industry. The books listed in further reading in the post actually contain chapters about git and emacs, and I share your enthusiasm for Bentley's li…
Re: Teaching Software Architecture with GitHub
#21What repels me is the kind of approach taken by this Rozanski & Woods book. It's like a 500 pages of authors philosophy of software, and whether all that is of any use is completely uncertain. There is not much of a widely established corpus of knowledge on software engineering/architecture, another book would treat an almost completely different set of concepts, and whatever is commonly agreed upon is trivial and most people invent in on their own when they need it. You can publish completely anything about "Software architecture" in this spirit thats sounds smart enough and it won't ever be put to any test. I personally, from experience, don't believe any practical high-level theory of software engineering of this kind exists at all, the more "philosophical" or "theoretical" it gets the less useful it becomes. It is much better to spend this time studying established disciplines where things actually get tested out one way or another, mathematics, algorithms, operating systems, ... If there is anything specific to be taught under "software architecture", it's those ideas ("patterns") that made certain programs so much better than the alternatives, but you only really learn them by digging deep in, not by studying some very abstract models.