Stephen Downes

There's all kinds of goodness lurking just under the surface here. The short simple version is that Gordon Brander is describing a multi-agent software environment that could succeed in a way that object oriented programming (OOP) did not, by enabling compositionality. Where's the goodness? It comes when you read this in the context of a bunch of other things, like the post on signs I just wrote, for example, or the relation between learning objects and OOP, or Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind, or this comment on what scales: "Consensus doesn't scale. Context graphs do. Imperialist ontologies don't scale. Protocols do. Interoperability doesn't scale. Boundaries do." The idea of 'small pieces loosly joined' is a core idea of the internet (and of cognition gemnerally), and what makes it work - but what kind of pieces, and how are they joined? This turns out to matter. A lot.