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[Stuart Langridge]

Rob Annable said:
> I'm glad I chucked that one into the pot. Hello to all you readers who
> think there isn't enough Linux talk here.
>
> Usability _is_ beauty.

Ah, but beauty is not usability. That is all ye know on earth, and all ye
need to know.

We seem to be coming rather sharply to the conclusion that usability is a
necessary but not sufficient condition for beauty, no?

Moreover, I have to say that an appreciation for usability *as* beauty is
one peculiar to creators; people who make things, whether architects or
information architects. Appreciation for a thing because of its closeness
to the Platonic form of such a thing, its minimal distance from the
perfect execution, is, I think, possibly *the* thing that makes you a
hacker rather than a programmer. I don't know how this applies in real
architecture, at least partially because I don't know how you can *be* an
architect without such a predeliction.

There's a hobbyist tradition in programming, and there are legions of
people who are paid to do it but don't feel the karmic ebb and flow of the
code in their veins. Does the same thing apply in architecture? How small
does a project have to be before it requires no architect? Or is that a
ridiculous question with the answer "every project requires an architect"?

Aq.