The Sage Commander

Some of you reading this blog may have gotten your first exposure to Rolonics through the work of my buddy, my dearest friend, and (what seems like) my life long collaborator Bill LaForge (or BiLaf as I sometimes refer to him). Bill has pioneered the field of Rolonic Software Engineering (RSE). His corpus of work is a treasure trove of Rolonic theory and practice. (A good starting place is AgileWiki.)

Rolonics, however, is a broader theory than RSE. Rolonics deals with universals. This will both delight and frustrate software engineers since some of it is practical (that is, able to be manifested in software and software practice) and some of it is elusive and difficult to capture.

In an earlier blog entry I referred to structures and streams and stated that they are two sides of the same coin – interrelated and inseparable. In fact, let’s call them what they really are – space and time. How much more universal can you get than that!

Since Rolonics is my filter for the world I find examples of it everywhere. A particular source of inspiration is Sun-Tzu’s The Art of War and its commentaries. Last night I came across a quote from Roger Ames’s translation and commentary and it got me thinking. One of the recurring themes in Sun-Tzu is the concept of the Sage Commander -- the person of wisdom who sees the inter-connected world and operates within it for his advantage. To quote Ames, “The commander in defining the configuration of his forces treats his spatial form as a temporal flow”. The Sage Commander is a master of space and time – a Rolonicist.