At the end of this post is a premble of my purposes, copied from the post I just made in another therad. These posts go together really.

I am familar with and an advocate of the Big Ball of Mud design pattern. Big ball of mud is what naturally and organically evolves if you don't have a formal methodology and if you eschew design-up-front or waterfall approachs.

Big ball of mud is not an intractable problem. Big Ball MUST evolve to fit new requirements and features and compete with other organisms in their own ecosystems.

Big Ball has traditionally evolved through a technique that used to be called "fixing all this garbage code that the incompetant fools before wrote" or "doing what I han to restructure the mess that they left me". This technique has been codified and which now is called Refactoring and has its own conferences and journals. Of course, the person trashing those who came before left a BBoM at the company he came from, and he, despite his critiques of his fellow designers, will leave a BBoM behind when he leaves.

BBoM is a rich soup of organisms. Refactoring is the gentle organic manipulation, encouragement or weeding of the Mudball in order to allow the beneficial organisms to flourish, revealing the pattern of the garden below the Mudball. The discovery of these patterns leaves a more satisfying garden. The structures such as rows of plants or clusters or things growing on poles and strings or planting carrots between tomatoes are called Design Patterns. They were discovered by a chap in Australia named Bill Mollison. He has named the system of beneficial organic Design Patterns he found "Permaculture". His ideas were later borrowed into the field of architecture by Christopher Alexander. And attempt was made to introduce these ideas into the field of software development, but the attempt failed, according to Christopher Alexander, because the patterns being promoted did not result in better or heathier software, but rather fixated on the needs of the developers instead of that of the end users. This is comprable to how agribusiness has selected the Design Pattern of Pesticide-SyntheticFertilizer-GMO even though it only benefits them and not those who are forced to eat the products/dogfood/code.

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PREAMBLE

The tribe description is opaque to me. However, I do have ideas about Organic Programming the term and what it means to me. I see two dimensions to Organic Programming:

*Dimension X.* Parallel to organic farming. Intervention is done by WORKING WITH the natural forces instead of opposing them. Artificial external devices, whether chemicals, or processes, are avoided. Using them MIGHT be more efficient, yes. But their use and presence are known to POISON the ecosystem. For example, heavy rigourous process tends to wear down the spirits of the creative developers and drives away all the best members of the team, ensuring that future crops (products) will be functional, but pasty in texture and without much flavor.

*Dimension Y.* Parallel to organic systems. A tangled mat of undergrowth that gradually forms to make a forest. Our central thesis of design: The Big Ball of Mud pattern, integrated with refactoring, works to create order out of chaos. This order is highly structured code based on design patterns that were organically derived through this noninvasive code farming methodology.

I am going to adopt these two simultaneously as working definitions and see where it goes.

Dimension X will be addressed in the Andy Warhol thread.
Dimension Y I have addressed above.