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All 253 Patterns from Christopher Alexander's a Pattern Language Summarized
(claytondorge.com)
113
19
by toomuchtodo
by toomuchtodo
He also talks about community in a city, so it walks across all scales in the build world. That really helped me think about ”scale” and what phenomena emerges at different scales. I haven’t seen those thoughts about community when I have read about patterns in SWE.
Patterns mostly revolves around solving specific problem in programming, but I haven’t yet found something that uses the same thoughts on a larger scale explicitly. I believe there are patterns for how to architect multiple softwares, but what’s beyond that scale? Say how to integrate different SWE communities.
Maybe a bit of a tangent to your point:
one major difference that jumped out at me about Alexander's work vs the software engineering 'patterns' is how much emphasis Alexander places on involving the people who will live & work in the buildings in the design process. Some of this involved including the building's eventual inhabitants during rapid prototyping -- it's really cheap to experiment with different building outlines when it's just folks standing around in an empty plot of land prototyping the outlines with pegs & string.
I first read about Alexander's work in the book _Peopleware_, they described this aspect of it as "local control of design by those who will occupy the space". A space that can be customised to the needs of those who use it.
That's something completely absent in the software engineering 'pattern language' stuff, which tends to feel more like ivory tower big design up front by the architect / throw it over the fence to the users.
While the narration of the talk itself is likely lost to time and "people weren't recording everything in 2002"... the slides linked are reasonable signposts of the author's ideas.
The key points I believe occur on slide 12.
Patterns vs. "Patterns"
The pattern language does not tell you how to design anything
It helps you decide what should be designed
You get to make up whatever patterns you think will lead to good designs
I believe that people read the GoF Design Pattern book as a textbook or bible rather than what the authors were doing of "these are things that we discovered while writing a word processor" ... and are useful ways of looking at those problems. But then those patterns got enshrined in some holy temple as you need to do these things and this is how you build software".
Patterns got turned into a prescriptive thing that people do to build software and for a long while people were often coming up with the question "did I discover a new pattern" ... which when you read Alexander's book becomes a silly question.
My own rant on the cult of pattern... https://the-whiteboard.github.io/2016/09/02/patterns.html
... One of my favorite pages to link on career advice is Find the Hard Work You're Willing to Do https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26209541 ... The previous blog post that shows up on that same page is "Why Patterns Failed and Why You Should Care" https://www.cs.uni.edu/~wallingf/blog/archives/monthly/2018-... which is also a good read (which in turn links to another talk - https://www.deconstructconf.com/2017/brian-marick-patterns-f... which has transcript and video)
But that's like an upper management type concern, you usually don't call that "SWE" anymore.
I.e. just like C. Alexander's patterns quickly leave the realm of laying brick, the same logic appled to software quickly leaves the realm of writing code.
It's hard to get more fundamental than that, in software at least.
I remember trying to read his four book Magnum opus and found it much too dense. I think he settled on "life" as the quality without a name.
Once you read it you’ll recognize what makes a certain neighborhood feel so right. Or what makes some towns and villages perfect in terms of liveability.
And it carries through to what makes some houses feel instantly perfect.
It does seem very western though, I wonder how many of these patterns work in Asia or Africa for example?
I haven't been able to find it on archive.org or anywhere else. It might have been twiki or similar if not mediawiki software.
I do find it a bit funny that the main image is of a building with fake shutters, which is somewhat against the ethos of A Pattern Language.
I know you put work in, but your site is essentially a listicle, basically missing the purpose.
Christopher Alexander was very influential on the construction of our house, such as the recommendation against corridors and having any passages become living space.