Richard Gabriel seems to agree. The inhabitants are able to modify their environment because each part is built according to the familiar patterns of design, use and construction and because those patterns contain the seeds for piecemeal growth. At least it is when the surrounding culture is coherent enough to embrace generations of experience. In terms of architecture, vernacular buildings are seen as the opposite of whatever is academic, high style, polite. Vernacular building traditions have the attention span to incorporate generational knowledge about long-term problems such as maintaining and growing a building over time.
Vernacular buildings evolve.
As generations of new buildings imitate the best of mature buildings, they increase in sophistication while retaining simplicity. Long names get worn down to three-letter nubbins like stones smoothed by a river. It is this sort of acculturation that gives UNIX hackers their confidence in the system, and the attitude of calm, unshakable, annoying superiority. Windows95 and MacOS are products, contrived by engineers in the service of specific companies. UNIX, by contrast, is not so much a product as it is a painstakingly compiled oral history of the hacker subculture.