Chad Fowler
@chadfowler.com
3.2K followers 705 following 752 posts
GP&CTO @blueyard.com Author, musician, speaker, developer AT-proto based encrypted group chat protocol: @freeq.at Regenerative Software with the Phoenix Architecture: aicoding.leaflet.pub chadfowler.com
![“ Through the personal computing era and into the present, the application boundary can be understood as the commodity boundary — the unit that can be named, sold, installed, updated, and owned by a producer. An application must be a discrete unit that can be exchanged; it requires a producer-consumer relation between developer and user; and because software can be copied at zero marginal cost, it requires artificial scarcity mechanisms — proprietary formats, restricted APIs, platform lock-in, source secrecy — to sustain exchange value. This is not a neutral technical arrangement but a self-reinforcing one. As Tchernavskij demonstrates, Parnas’s invention of information hiding was motivated by a specific mode of production: top-down, centralized management of large disconnected teams in an industrial design process. [7] This technique, devised for commodity production, became encapsulation in object-oriented programming and embedded itself in compilers, frameworks, and IDEs. The mode of production inscribes itself in the tools; the tools reproduce the mode of production.”](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:zcanytzlaumjwgaopolw6wes/bafkreigfbmgkjyi4gz2dzl22xwohvtv2bxj7ychbtn6f3isv6gpjvmrgty)
