Canada’s two major competing freight railways, Canadian National (CN) and Canadian Pacific (CP), recently announced that they would be cooperating to make both their operations more efficient at the busy Port of Vancouver. By sharing access to rail lines and other infrastructure, they believe that they can compete more effectively on the services they provide, rather than on which company has access to particular facilities.

Comparisons are occasionally made between architecture and software development, or architecture and web design. Software and websites are obviously much younger concepts than buildings. Buildings also face more stringent physical limitations in what they can do—and more catastrophic results if they are designed and built poorly. So while software and website designers can make jokes about architects, we really are working in very different fields.

Bruce Schneier argues that truly secure physical and technological infrastructures must have public designs, because keeping things secret doesn’t make them secure: “Secrets are fragile; once they’re lost they’re lost forever. Security that relies on secrecy is also fragile; once secrecy is lost there’s no way to recover security. Trying to base security on secrecy is just plain bad design.”

Vancouver’s Tim Bray, of Sun Microsystems: “Suppose you’re a keen young programmer […] Your situation is quite a bit different from the inventor of centuries back. That’s because secrecy is a much more attractive strategy. […] In an ideal world, I’d rewrite the law to allow software patents but require a working Open-Source implementation as a condition of getting one. Because both software documentation and patent applications are notoriously inaccurate, incomplete, and unreadable.”

MIT professor Philip Greenspun, often a man of controversial opinions, thinks that undergraduate computer science programs (in North America at least) do not prepare students for the real world of programming. He asks on his website, “What actual skills will a [computer science] graduate need in order to get a job? To get a satisfying job? To keep a job in the face of pressure from younger and/or cheaper workers?” He offers some suggestions, and asks for comments.