a linguistic approach to software architecture design

Discussions of software architecture depend upon the meaning of the words and symbols used by the people in the discussion. Like a human language, the tokens can be densely packed patterns or styles or they can be low-level primitives to show how a design can be refined. It seems to me that the same cognitive mechanisms are at work in both.

When I talk about a client-server system I conjure up an abstract concept just as if I had said chair. We recognize both by a set of characteristics that define the concept. Yet to be helpful both must be modified to assist with design. I may speak of a dining room chair or lounge chair. I may talk about a web server and client or one on a proprietary network that uses a protocol other than HTTP/HTML. The concept lends itself to restriction and extension. In language we usually do this with adjectives. As a class concept, this would be done with sub-classes. I saw some references to work like this that I must check out.

This is also highly consistent with the Lakoff/Johnson way of looking at these patterns as metaphors. We invoke the metaphor and then call out the ways in which they are extended into concrete forms or in which we define a new form by substituting one thing for another.