www.quondam.com/33/3305t.htm

Quondamopolis

The Plays of Nicholas Breakspear

27 October

2013.10.27 10:55

"In commenting on his creation, which he acknowledged to be a modest and slightly silly contribution to the fledging field of natural-language processing, Weizenbaum observed how easy it is for computer programmers to make machines "behave in wondrous way, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experienced observer." But as soon as a program's "inner workings are explained in language sufficiently plain to induce understanding," he continued, "its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures, each quite comprehensible. The observer says to himself 'I could have written that.'" The program goes "from the shelf marked "intelligent" to that reserved for curios."

With regard to "I could write (do) that," is this what happens when architecture theory is written in plain language? And, conversely, is some architecture theory abstruse so others think (implicitly) "I couldn't do that"?

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