Why we need a different view of software architecture

The definition and understanding of software architectures and architecture views still shows considerable disagreement in the software engineering community. The paper argues that the problems we face exist because our understanding is based on specious analogies with traditionally engineered artefacts. A review of the history of ideas shows the evolution of this understanding. A detailed examination is then presented of the differences that exist between the nature of the systems, the content of their large-scale representations, and how they are used in practice in the respective disciplines. These differences seriously undermine the analogies used to develop our understanding and this is discussed in terms of software engineering as a whole.