Two different approaches to building beautiful things: the cathedral and the bazaar.

The cathedral is a massive, beautiful object with a coherent vision.

It requires massive amounts of time, capital, and coordination.

Cathedral is top down.

It is a high-fidelity manifestation of a particular author's differentiated vision.

The beauty and innovation comes from a highly constrained and opinionated plan.

The constraints are a cage on possibility.

Selecting out of the infinite things that are possible a single, extremely high fidelity option.

The bazaar is a sprawling, organic, emergent swarm of innovation.

The structure is loose or even non-existent.

"At midday in the central square people congregate to trade"

Bazaar is bottom up.

All of the beauty and innovation comes not from the intricate web of constraints, but from a very small set of enabling constraints that everything else emerges from.

The constraint is a platform.

No internal selection pressure for a particular outcome among others.