A system should have a powerful metaphor that is uniformly applied to each of its parts
Conceptually integrity doesn’t have a great definition from what I’ve gathered, it essentially just means you shouldn’t have weird parts of a system that seem bolted-on or like they don’t “fit” with the rest. Often times this is achieve through a powerful metaphor describing the philosophy of the system.
It strikes me that the strength of some of my favorite pieces of software is strong conceptual integrity:
- Notion is built around the block. No feature in Notion strays away from the block as a base concept. Everything it does is an extension of the block.
The PDW concept would be something like:
- An Entry owns a collection of related EntryPoints, with an associated Definition, taking place in a Period.
This is what’s behind the argument that says “a hammer is the Perfect Tool”. It executes on its concept perfectly. It cannot be reduced. It cannot be meaningfully improved on.