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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> it is totally valid to use orchestration and choreography. Same as Confluent pushes the case to use choreography, this post pushes to just use orchestration.

What's the metaphor here? As far as I can see, orchestration is about coordinating the timing of several simultaneous and interdependent musical performances, while choreography is about coordinating the timing of several simultaneous and interdependent dance performances. But I strongly suspect that the difference between auditory and visual display isn't what you're supposed to get out of this terminology. How am I supposed to remember which approach is which?

Neither orchestration nor choreography involves agents reacting to other agents; there's an objective clock and everyone takes their cues from that.

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People need to dream up new jargon to get other people to feel like their design patterns are “official”, I guess. I was wondering the same thing. It seems pretty arbitrary.

I think the analogy is clear when I think of it as: - Orchestration brings the idea of a conductor, who is the main reference for "what should we do" among orchestra players. - Choreography brings the idea of dancers in sync without the need of a central conductor.

> Choreography brings the idea of dancers in sync without the need of a central conductor.

Try that and let me know how it works.

In reality, the dancers are of course synced by the music, dependent on the same conductor as the orchestra.

And on top of that, orchestration isn't the conductor's job. It's the composer's (or arranger's) job, putting it exactly parallel to choreography. The orchestrator, like the choreographer, determines who does what and when they do it, and he does it in advance. Most typically, years or centuries in advance. The conductor determines how fast the clock runs.

Interesting. A counter example, WWE (wrestling) is choreographed. The wrestlers react to the cues of the other wrestlers. It's not necessarily based on time or music, but instead a pre-agreed sequence.

I think the catch is that not all cues need to be time based and that is the distinction. In orchestration, there is one source for cues - the orchestrator.

The difference I think speaks to orchestration where the players get their cues from one source, while choreography has different source(s) for cues (time/tempo perhaps being one of them)

> In orchestration, there is one source for cues - the orchestrator.

Just to be clear, everyone's talking about the conductor, who keeps time for the orchestra, but conductors don't do orchestration. The orchestrator is the person who wrote the score.

Good point, for the analogy, I should have written conductor instead of orchestrator. The point remains though that the difference is in the source of synchronization.

Orchestration needs an orchestrator, choreography does not.

> Orchestration needs an orchestrator, choreography does not.

That analogy doesn't make sense to me.

An orchestra can play a piece without a conductor.

Choreography has an "orchestrator" for all but the final performance.

Neither can work indefinitely without a director, while both can work for a single performance without a director.

So it's still not clear to me what the difference is supposed to be.

Huh? If you don't have a choreographer, you don't have choreography. You have improvisation instead.

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