It's interesting both from an architectural/societal point of view, as well as providing a great example of a wiki-like organisation of ideas and patterns that build on and enhance each other.

Regardless of the original source, this is a great explanation of the concept..

http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Language-Buildings-Constructio...

Filed a bug: https://github.com/munificent/game-programming-patterns/issu...

It has similar flaws, as well. It should be considered descriptive, not prescriptive--and Christopher Alexander is not nearly as careful around that distinction as the GoF.

Highly recommend Alexander's "A Pattern Language." I just did an insanely massive purge, and this is one of the few books I kept.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern

Get a copy of A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander

In googling for "A room of one's own", though, I discovered that it's also the title of an essay by Virginia Wolfe written in 1929. It's possible that might possibly have inspired the name of the pattern in Christopher Alexander's book.

Do urban architects know about this video and the A Pattern Language book? Has the school of thought changed in recent years? Has the introduction of CAD tools changed/simplified the architecture style?

The difference is that Alexander’s method was rooted in self-sufficiency. Do-it-yourself without an architect or contractor.

(The Oregon Experiment, which I mention in that link, might also be of interest to programmers inside huge organizations.)

Or if for some reason you are in a location gbs won't deliver to or otherwise it's unavailable to you, yeah, #20.

I'm sure the area being pre-gentrified has nothing to do with the opinions of the locals whatsoever. Cynicism aside, I do empathize with Prince Charles view on brutalist architecture here.

(But what do I know? The only books on architecture I ever read were Christopher Alexander's The Timeless Way Of Building and A Pattern Language, and only because I heard they somehow were influential on software development)

A lot of the comments remind me of patterns from A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander. I'm sure many people on HN know this book from the preface to Design Patterns, but if you've never flipped through it you really should - any single pattern contains a great deal of insight into how we live in the world.

> At the University of Oregon campus, outrage and vocal distaste for Brutalism led, in part, to the hiring of Christopher Alexander and the initiation of The Oregon Experiment in the late 1970s. This led to the development of Alexander's A Pattern Language and The Timeless Way of Building.

Anyways, highly recommended, if nothing else to get insight in human patterns regarding living spaces and communities

On another note, I'm really excited to see that A Pattern Language was an inspiration for this sim. That seems like a great start!

[0] http://molleindustria.org/GamesForCities/

I even think the programmers of 'The Sims' and others used it.
Sometimes it's also called Object-Oriented Design.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23881363

Funny that it was a American (Christopher Alexander)who write the most concise recipe for getting this right in "A Pattern Language." Pattern 88, Street Café.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

http://www.jacana.plus.com/pattern/P88.htm

http://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/ieee.html

This how the author summaries the intent of Christopher Alexander's work. I have not read "A Pattern Language" so it's difficult to say if this is accurate or not. However this is such an important issue in software engineering that I would welcome any ideas to reduce the problem.

I agree when the author that the GoF addressed a lower level problem. However, I'm also disappointed by these slides that provide not hints for a better high-level approach. The GoF patterns form a language for developers speaking to developpers. We also need a language across roles.

"A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander.

"The No Asshole Rule".

"How to Lie with Statistics".

That said, once you've read it, you will forever find the flaming garbage dump that is contemporary architecture severely wanting. These days, and architect could almost be summarized as someone who designs buildings and hates people.

It may be that he's a brilliant/inspiring communicator and a competent practitioner. Others like this (to my mind) are Douglas R Hofstadner and David Flanagan. We need inspiring writers; it's a good thing.

Interesting topics such as the design of a front door viewed from a street have stuck with me and is something I reflect on when walking through an old neighborhood. Infallibly the most appealing houses match up well to the principals outlined in the book.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

My point is that you don't have to have this knowledge, and you don't have to hire expert craftspeople and pay them expert wages if you can have a machine do the difficult work.

> And most importantly you would know that right angles are almost always the right answer...

Not necessarily. Box-shaped rooms work nicely, but the most important thing is to not have acute angles between walls. (IIRC Christopher Alexander goes into this in A Pattern Language in defense of right-angle walls, but for some reason neglects to consider rooms with more than 4 sides as an option.) Greater than 90 degrees is fine as long as it doesn't present a problem for the intended use (i.e. client expects furniture to fit at right angles). Also, if you're printing a whole house you can design benches, shelves, desks, and so forth into the design. Or maybe contract out to some service that will make the furniture based on a 3D model.

A big part of why walls are straight and meet at right angles is that building materials are generally straight and expect to be joined at right angles. Anything else turns into a complicated geometry problem that takes a lot longer to build. With a 3D printer, though, that's not a limitation. It doesn't matter how simple or complicated a design is, it takes about the same amount of time to print and uses about the same amount of material. The main constraints then just become what's strongest, nicest-looking, and most functional. Most people will probably prefer box-shaped rooms, but the point is that they'll have options if a box-shaped room isn't optimal.

One could imagine if house-design software becomes sufficiently advanced, you could dispense with the architect as well. Someone who wants a house could just log onto a website, identify the site where the house is to be built, and specify a bunch of constraints and preferences, and then the backend software generates a bunch of house plans. The customer choses the one they like and pay the money, then a building permit is applied for and a printing machine and work crew show up on site and assemble a house that's unique and exactly suited to its site.

In fact, it surprises me the focus on “A Pattern Language” at all when the “Notes on the Synthesis of Form” is a much relevant book on the topic of gathering requirements, prototyping and designing solutions.

Anyway, I recommend going straight to the source and reading Christopher Alexander’s work as it’s very relevant for anyone designing solutions of any form.

Clock of the Long Now, by Stewart Brand - for the concepts of deep time and the long now; appreciating a sense of how we experience time and our place in history
[See also: Time and the Art of Living]

Flatland, by Edwin A. Abbott - creative parable that's very helpful for conceptualizing abstract concepts of topology and higher dimensions

Thinking in Systems, A Primer, by Donella Meadows - great introduction to systems thinking, which is a useful lens for appreciating the complexity of all sorts of complex phenomena

A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander - great work of urban design, useful framework for looking at design systems and how pieces fit together on different scales
[See also: Death and Life of Great American Cities]

Oulipo - A Primer of Potential Literature - nice introduction to the Oulipo and ideas of constraint as creative / poetic device
[See also: Exercises in Style; Eunoia]

Impro, by Keith Johnstone - great primer on improvisation, really made me appreciate its impacts beyond just the theater, for example the importance of status in social relations

The Power Broker, by Robert Caro - unbeatably rich and compelling look at how power and politics actually work, for better (power gets things done) and for worse (power blinds and corrupts)

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, by Annie Dillard - beautiful, meticulously observed study of the natural world close at hand; made me appreciate the power of looking deeply and persistently

Le Ton beau de Marot, by Douglas Hofstadter - remarkable exploration of language and translation, in all its magic and complexity…both deeply personal and deeply researched, a must-read for lovers of language

The Library at Night, by Alberto Manguel - turned me on to the various lenses through which we can conceive of and appreciate libraries; their vast power and potential

Moby Dick, by Herman Melville - for really hammering home the grand, powerful potential of great literature and well-wrought language
[ See also: Don Quixote; Infinite Jest]

(I would recommend reading or skimming through "A Pattern Language" first, to get a good idea of what Alexander's idea of a well-formed pattern is. It's also a really interesting book in its own right, especially if you have any interest in architecture.)

[1] - well worth a read. Did you know there was a terribly humane philosophy behind the original design patterns work? This was beautifully described in Peopleware as "Local control of design by those who will occupy the space". E.g. - Alexander advocates for the people who are going to live in and work in the buildings be intimately involved in both the design and the construction of the buildings. Not only does he advocate for this, he explains ways of doing this in practice. This philosophy could be ported to software -- let the users of software systems be involved in the design and construction of the systems. That sounds like far more of an ambitious and genuinely positive idea than the old "visitor pattern" / "singleton [anti]pattern" stuff that springs to mind when one has been subjected to the computer-science-education version of design patterns.

It's ironic that people are arguing that books are a waste of time - on HN.

There are certainly too many one-idea books, but there are also many extraordinary, irreplicable works: A Pattern Language, Thinking Fast and Slow, The Landscape of History, The Modern Firm, The Diffusion of Innovations, Bowling Alone, The Life You Can Save, And the Band Played On, and on and on.

I always had the notion though, the software pattern way was a misinterpretation of Alexanders ideas. Alexander doesn't stop to emphasize that a pattern can (and should) have an uncountable number of slightly different implementations, as the special situation requests. He is outspokenly against reusing an implementation without adequate modification for the situation in architectural applications.

I always understood the highest goal in software engineering is to write code that can be reused without modification. I never could agree that this is a good idea for the users of software. It is only more economical to build. Just what Alexander defines as the most evil thing ever, because in architecture this leads to faceless homes.

The idea to reuse implementations of patterns is one that in another context delivers us cars that are more or less all VW Golf (Rabbit) underneath.

Referring to it as 'a set of tricks' would suggest to me that you've only given it a cursory glance and assumed that it's just about copying out example blocks of code, or that you've not worked in a wide enough set of languages to realize that every language has commonly used patterns for doing particular things, no matter how expressive the language is. Having a way to discuss the architecture of a piece of software without having to explain every implementation detail because there's already a shorthand refer to various parts of it is invaluable when working on larger projects. Being able to call a block of code as a flywheel is no more a trick than being able to refer to an options pricing equation as a 'modified black-scholes' - the important part is that other person knows from that what you're talking about and so you can get to the important part of the conversation.

This was my thought too. This quote by architect Christopher Alexander from his book A Pattern Language" feels very relevant:

"…face-to-face rental, with the owners occupying the main structure is the one kind of rental relationship that is reasonably healthy. The landlord is actually there, so he is directly concerned with the well-being of the life around him and with the environment, unlike the absentee landlords who own property only for the money which it makes."

In the UK, we have huge numbers of buy-to-let landlords. They are the worst type of abstentee landlord. I see AirBnB operating in the same space.

People like having familiar neighbours, not neighbours who come and go contantly, and who have no commitment, concern or care for their neighbourhood; or for their immediate neighbours. Do these things matter to absentee landlords? For most of them (especially in the UK), absolutely not.

Housing has a social factor that cannot be ignored. In fact, it isn't ignored in countless countries who place restrictions on renting property for the very reasons above.

They attribute tall buildings with insanity, as denizens begin losing scope of their world simply by virtue of not being able to see beyond buildings.

Another thing to note is that "Centers of Culture" are beginning to become more amorphous, as tech gentrification is whitewashing a lot of what gave San Francisco its identity. The Mission is probably the most glaring example of transformation, for better or worse.

The narrative 'Father of..' feels too pedestal-y for such a humble man.

Alexander talks about the timelessness and beauty of buildings in terms of culturally-defined patterns—almost ‘design patterns’ but a bit more abstract—that are applied and repeated to create buildings and spaces that evoke a particular “feeling without a name”: something we all feel when a building feels alive and congruous with the actions that take place there. A beautiful building is symbiotic with its purpose, its surroundings, and the people who use it.

That’s sort of a gross oversimplification though. I really recommend checking it out. Though its focus is loosely on architecture, I’ve seen a lot of engineers and designers get excited about it and find applications to their own work.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

It contains lots of good examples on why some spaces are livable and why others are not. The book itself is a bit ideological but most of the described patterns are really great and give you a good understanding of why e.g. rural Italian or French villages have this nice vibe to them.

To someone who is trying to make an artistic statement with their buildings, A Pattern Language might be uninteresting, since his advice is essentially the architectural equivalent of composing music in a major key according to traditional rules of harmony. If that's what you want to do, that's great, but if you want to make something deliberately dissonant or challenge traditional notions, it's not so helpful.

It's also worth noting that Alexander has some very strong opinions about things, and (just like any other area of human endeavor) there are architects who disagree with him.

I recently bought The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth. Within the first 2 pages I was already hooked. But in fairness, It's because I think we are two minds alike so I hardly disagree with him... which I think it's bad.

> 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'm not sure I completely agree with this. I agree Alexander was trying to establish a vocabulary for communicating common ideas, and I agree that his collection of patterns wasn't meant to be the one true canonical list of architecture patterns, but I do think a lot of his patterns do specifically tell you how to design things. Also much of what he wrote isn't specific to large construction projects with many stakeholders ("The Oregon Experiment", which I haven't read, is an account of the process of designing the University of Oregon campus. However, "A Pattern Language" would also be of use to a person designing their own house by themself.)

What makes A Pattern Language more interesting and intellectually honest than just a list of design rules is that he gives justifications for each pattern and tells you what problem they solve and why he believes them to be an optimal solution. Anyone else can come along and propose a better pattern that solves that problem (or a more general one) in a better way, or can provide some argument that the problem isn't really a problem in certain circumstances. There's no appeal to authority or tradition; patterns are judged solely on their merits (to the extent that we can understand what those are; architecture is strongly tied to psychology, which isn't entirely understood).

(I really wish that someone would write a book similar to A Pattern Language, but about music theory.)

He says that suburbs are configured "wrong", in a way that's antithetical to life.

Because the children go to school somewhere nearby, where they are babysat, and the fathers (at that time) commute to work in the city.

And the children have no idea what their parents do, and that is alienating. The configuration of space diminishes people and relationships. They don't see their parents enough and they don't learn from them.

Children want to learn from "real" work, not the fake work of school, which is why so many of them can't sit still in class, and get poor grades despite being smart, etc.

That work/suburb split definitely describes how I grew up, so I remember that point very distinctly. You are supposed to jump through hoops for 12 years, and then apply to a place where you jump through 4 more years of hoops, etc. But you are confused about how the world actually works. It's not a good way of teaching people to be adaptable to the world.

I haven't surveyed zoning policies, so I don't know whether I agree with your conclusion, but I'd like to clarify a couple things.

First, we must ask ourselves what the goal of optimal zoning policy is. Is it to maximize the number of people who live there? Achieve an ideal rent/wage ratio? Maximize the efficiency of shared infrastructure?

Perhaps it is to maximize the desirability of living in an area. If that is the case, then if people are complaining about the house prices that may mean you're doing something right.

In any case, assuming we settle on a shared metric (which may involve a combination of these various factors), we need to distinguish between comparing the average case and the worst case performance of centralized vs. decentralized zoning policy.

I would say that my claim is that decentralized zoning policy will have a significantly better worst-case than centralized zoning policy, and that crafting a good zoning policy is enough of a gamble that I'd rather settle for a less-than-ideal decentralized policy than risk a horrendous centralized one.

Now, to tie back to the original debate of scientific expertise in particular: would adding a group of economists and social scientists to the central planning committee tilt the situation in favor of central planning? I very much doubt it.

"At the core […] is the idea that people should design for themselves their own houses, streets and communities. This idea […] comes simply from the observation that most of the wonderful places of the world were not made by architects but by the people."

— Christopher Alexander et al., A Pattern Language, front bookflap[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

We don't need styles, movement or whatever, we need forms evolved for a long time by normal humans (on this point I'm a fan of Christopher Alexander position on architecture, see A Pattern Language or The Timeless Way of Building). Modern architecture is just a fraud based on nothing.

Look at those :
* http://www.hugues-bosc.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/M...
* https://sunnyspainholidays.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/su...

I agree, though, that the most interesting aspects of Alexander never made it into GoF. His key insight is that buildings should be designed around what makes humans feel more alive in them. Applying that to software, you'd end up thinking more about projects and teams than about iterators or singletons.

Another aspect of Alexander that's relevant to programming is his exploratory approach to making buildings. As I understand it, he never designs anything up front. Rather, he studies the site, talks to the people, and builds a little at a time, allowing the thing to emerge in a way that is appropriate.

1: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79766.A_Pattern_Language

* No one will care about your project as much as you and this includes the architect :(

* Few(???) architects and zero builders seem to understand light/wind/circulation like people apparently intuitively did 200 years ago. You might be better off with the average curious engineer designing the house than the average architect. Everyone is astonishingly lazy, even mansions around here have terrible light/circulation problems.

* VR is no match for IRL! It's best to actually get a measuring tape and stake out the dimensions of the house on the land. An even better, get chalk and go to a big flat parking lot and draw out the entire floor plan (compass-correct) and walk inside, looking at the sun (keeping in mind what season). This worked well for me, I should have done more of it. I didn't build a porch though, which is where getting more exacting summer/winter sun angles would matter.

I actually got the chalk idea from the excellent movie The Founder, where the creators of McDonalds try out different kitchen workflow models this way.

* Draw and sketch a huge amount. Sketch facades freeform, with the ruler, etc. The fidgeting will help you discover things.

* Read a bunch of books about old houses. Maybe most approachably: Get Your House Right and A Pattern Language

* Get a pinterest board for you + spouse. We used ours heavily and it was great for keeping track of interior detail decisions.

[1] It's a fundamentally simple house, basically a box that maximizes light and airflow and wood burning heat, so I probably had a much easier task than you. Some of the original drawings: https://twitter.com/simonsarris/status/1183150002002112512

Architecture is so much more complex and nuanced than that. Even "A Pattern Language" falls into the trap of providing reductive prescriptions. Ask literally any architect what they think of Christopher Alexander's actual built work, and they will either dismiss it or (more likely) won't even have heard of it.

Good architecture should be independent of materials including programming language, even though Alexanders books put heavy emphasis on how choosing good materials allows one to effortlessly apply his Pattern Language to build great buildings.

Also, Alexander's books made it clear that patterns are not building blocks. You need to use creative thinking to be able to combine them into a cohesive design, even adjusting the patterns to fit the situation and documenting your own personal set of patterns.

Too much of the post-GOF use of patterns treats them like fixed building blocks that have to be put together the way the book says, and if you deviate from the book, then you are doing it wrong. I think that is a mistaken way of thinking. It can be useful for a new developer to get over their first couple of years of learning how to build software, but since it is a crutch, using patterns as rigid building blocks will not get you far.

> the mere fact that the ceiling heights vary, allows people to move from high rooms to low rooms, and vice versa, according to the degree of intimacy they seek — because they know that everyone correlates
intimacy with ceiling height.

> According to this theory, the effect of the ceiling height is not direct; there is instead a complex interaction between people and space, in which people read the different ceiling heights in a building as messages, and take up positions according to these messages. They are comfortable or uncomfortable according to whether they can take part in this process, and can then feel secure in the knowledge that they have chosen a place of appropriate intimacy.

I'd add A Pattern Language to the list. It's actually been very appropriately valued by the programming community, but massively undervalued by its intended audience of architects and urban planners. Should've been the architecture and planning book of the 20th century; instead most design professionals have never heard of it. Their loss!

Yes! I think about this often. There is sort of a Zen or Bruce Lee aspect where thinking of things strictly in terms of named categories can lead to overly rigid thinking and cause you to avoid better solutions simply because they don't have a name and don't seem as "real".

There is a balancing act, though. When we write code on a team, there is a real value to shared understanding of the codebase. Sticking to familiar categories, even at some minor expense of fitness to the task, is probably a net gain if it makes it easier to the entire team to understand what the code is doing and why.

It's also important to remember that the primary reason the Gang of Four wrote Design Patterns and called them patterns after Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language is because they are not rigid copy/paste structures. If they were, we'd just call them data structures or algorithms.

The fundamental premise of why we call these patterns is that each manifestation of a pattern will appear slightly different, shaped by the context in which it is applied. That's why you don't often see resuable "pattern implementation libraries".

Good literature on patterns stresses this flexibility. Less good literature tends to just say "here's the thing that solves all your problems" and discourages readers from thinking deeply.

The shard language. The GoF wanted that shared language, but people missed the ideal behind it and thought it was a cookbook instead.

The GoF draws from A Pattern Language ( https://www.amazon.com/dp/0195019199/ ) and I believe does a better job at communicating what Patterns should be - a common language and broad brush strokes of solving common problems (though almost always require some tweaking to make it fit just right).

* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/885970.Patterns_of_Home

* http://www.architectureweek.com/topics/patterns.html

Reportedly his book A Pattern Language inspired the GoF software patterns book.

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/navLinks/fog0000000262.html

From that list, I also highly recommend:

* Peopleware (get your cofounders to read it too)

* Godel Escher Bach

* A Pattern Language (but don't bother reading it straight through)

* Growing A Business

Similarly, I can see that considering the known issues with top-down vs. bottom-up city planning/evolution could be beneficial for software-centric organizations too; the issues with badly-fit top-down city plans seem to match very well with the pains of an ill-fit software architecture that's mandated from an ivory tower, complete with users using the planned cities "wrong".

I'm sure there are differences though. You have a lot more observability into your software systems, and at the end of the day, they are orders of magnitude less complicated than cities, so you can comprehend more of the system at once, and truly find common usecases to standardize around. This is in contrast to cities where it's impossible to really know every citizen's unique needs, temperament, and usage patterns.

Worth thinking about more; given the relatively low cross-pollination rates between the fields, I suspect there are more lessons that software engineers could glean from architecture and city planning.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

Shades can help with privacy, but what if you want the privacy at the same time you want to be capturing heat? And if requires active control --- well, that's by definition not passive. Interestingly, the new movement in high efficiency houses is frequently for low solar gain windows: well insulated windows with special coatings to admit less heat while still admitting light.

From another standpoint, gigantic expanses of windows are rarely the best way to build a pleasant room. As well as being a rare crossover between Computer Science and Building Architecture, Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language" has lots to say on this. Some excerpts here: http://kk.org/cooltools/a-pattern-language/

Which is to say that opaque heat-gathering walls serve a purpose that is separate than that served by windows. Both have their place, and they don't tend to replace each other directly.

(1) Reads like "case-in-point" for Norvig's argument that the GoF patterns are artifacts of less expressive languages. Most of these examples battle clearer, more effective idiomatic alternatives in Ruby.

(2) Yet another misinterpretation of what Chris Alexander meant by "A Pattern Language". The GoF book isn't a cookbook, it's a starting point.

(3) This document didn't benefit at all from being "typeset" in PDF; any Wordpress blog with syntax highlighting plugins would have presented it better.

Wouldn't it be cool to see the "real" design patterns for Ruby?

Continuing tangent: if that sounds interesting, please consider also reading the precursor book "The Timeless Way of Building" by Christopher Alexander. It focuses on the theory and the philosophy. This is a beautiful book, in both senses of the beauty of the book itself, and the beauty of the ideas contained inside. It is very humane.

"There is one timeless way of building. It is thousands of years old, and the same today as it has always been. The great traditional buildings of the past, the villages and tents and temples in which man feels at home, have always been made by people who were very close to the center of this way. And as you will see, this way will lead anyone who looks for it to buildings which are themselves as ancient in their form as the trees and hills,and as our faces are."

It wouldn't hurt to have more humane and beautiful things in the world, particularly those that are designed and built and customised by those who must inhabit or use them. Whether those things are buildings, or software, or laws, or societal goals.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0195024028

http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?TheTimelessWayOfBuilding

You could say much the same thing about architecture. In that domain, I find Christopher Alexander's book A Pattern Language to be a very good reference for describing many concrete reasons why certain buildings feel better than others that seem to be pretty universal. (And we could reasonably expect to be able to test that if we were in doubt.)

It's not a complete theory of architecture and can't be, but partial theories are still tremendously useful and more likely to produce good results than blindly following stylistic rules without knowing what purpose they serve.

I've been hoping for awhile that someone will write a good music theory book in the same format.

So, I guess, besides just agreeing with you, sort of also saying, keep reading "TTWoB", soak it up, then you'll be primed for "APL". It's such a fun journey! (If you can't tell, I'm a big admirer of Christopher Alexander :) )

I think you got it, what I meant with "nobody". Sure there are fanboys and followers for almost every niche, what should matter are the mass of normal tourists. Some cities (and their city planers) understand that, some don't.

> they are [...] primarily functional

Sure, functionality is usually a requirement. But bog-standard sterile concrete box architecture is just laziness/tasteless or constraint by the budget. (that's another debate).

Coming back to the former debate-topic, there has been a certain influence in Modern Architecture.

This is true, but it's an effect, not a cause of the book. "Design Patterns" is older than Java. They wrote it based on patterns they saw mainly in Smalltalk and C++.

> prescribed their use generally

Like "A Pattern Language", "Design Patterns" reads more descriptively than prescriptively. It's, "Here's a thing we saw people do. Here's what problem they were solving with it. Here's the context of their problem. Here's the positive and negative consequences."

[1] https://archive.org/details/APatternLanguage

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_design_pattern#Histor...

To the curious, note that what the patterns are is not explained in 'A Pattern Language' but instead in the companion book 'Timeless way of Building'. It's quite a philosophical exposition. It talks about evoking 'The quality without a name', that every human has the capacity to feel, but not necessary to name or dissect.

Here's a quote for the curious from 'Timeless way of Building' that I think captures somewhat what the post wishes more software designers thought about in relation to patterns:

(page 236-237, speaking about the specialisation of professions in which people's pattern languages gets lost through disconnection)

"... Of course, even now a town still gets its shape from pattern languages of a sort. The architects and planners and bankers have pattern languages which tell them to build gigantic steel and concrete buildings. The users have a few shattered patterns left in their vocabulary: a sheet of plastic to make a kitchen counter; huge plate glass windows for the living room; wall-to-wall carpet in the bathroom -- and they enthusiastically piece these patches together, whenever they have a free weekend.

But these remnants of our former languages are dead and empty. They are based mainly on the by-products of industry. People use plate glass windows, formica counters, wall-to-wall carpet, because industry makes them available, not because these patterns contain anything essential about life, or how to live it.

The time when a pattern language was a song, in which people could sing the whole of life, is gone. The pattern languages in society are dead. They are ashes and fragments in the people's hands"

How: After designing a home following "A Pattern language" by Christopher Alexander and taking a course in owner-built homes multiple times, I got a construction loan at an exorbitant rate from private money (brokered by a specialist in private money). Then, I served as my own general contractor using conventional project management methods. Once the house was finished, it was easy to get a conventional home mortgage.

Following the patterns without understanding the philosophy makes no sense to me because it’s a very opinionated and, in the modern world, quite radical. What if you don’t agree with it? I think many don’t. At least, you want to be able to read them critically.

Any other architect can come along and say "I don't think that's a real problem" or "I think I have a better solution to that problem". There's no appeal to authority (e.g. "this is how architectural tradition says you're supposed to design things, and anything that breaks these rules is wrong"). Everyone is encouraged to work things out on their own from first principles and see if they come to the same conclusion. I think this is especially important in Architecture, where anything beyond basic utilitarian functionality is very tied to psychology and is therefore in a realm of conjecture where very little is definitively provable and yet many people seem to react very similarly to certain design elements.

In "A Timeless Way of Building", Alexander talks about cultivating the mental discipline of separating what you think ought to be a good design from analyzing your actual emotional response to that design. Learning to pay attention to the latter instead of the former can often lead in unexpected directions and result in better design.

One oft-quoted title is Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language", which advocates several building and design patterns, and ended up picked up mostly by the software engineering community.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

some previous discussions here on HN:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8111406

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3591834

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=331006

https://archive.org/details/APatternLanguage

It's just astonishing, decades after Jane Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities, that pragmatic observation is still on the margins. What, a half-century of abject failure in building and neighbourhood design isn't enough to demonstrate the fundamental wrongheadedness of dogmatic, a priori design principles?

I've recently been quite inspired by Christopher Alexander's "The Luminous Ground" (2003). For those who don't know, he's an architect and mathematician [2] whose work greatly influenced object-oriented programming (he's best-known for "A Pattern Language"), and in this most recent work of his, he addresses the concept of "wholeness" head-on -- investigating what can be done to integrate the completely separate worlds of art/spirit and physics, under the belief that they can't stay separated forever... and following in the steps of thinkers like Bohm, Penrose and Mandelbrot. (I.e. he's serious, not some new-age QM crackpot.)

The print copy is sadly ridiculously expensive, but whether online or in libraries there are definitely ways to read it if you're determined...

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Building-Environmental-S...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_pattern
[1]: https://www.martinfowler.com/articles/writingPatterns.html#A...

I think my fantasy ideal situation is probably like groups of 4-6 small private offices clustered in a L-shape around a shared small conference room. Next to other such groups on a corridor (or even sometimes inter-connected). Would surely be incredibly expensive office space. Oh, let's give each private office a window while we're at it then. :)

Writing this reminded me of Christopher Alexander, I bet there's a pattern for this in A Pattern Language. Looking... #146 Flexible Office Space touches it a bit.

I think there's probably way more to this than 'open office' vs 'individual offices', tons of diversity within each, well less in 'open office'. But open offices with 8 people vs 20 people vs 100 people are going to be very different, also the square feet per person, and the layout and furniture.

Not true, they build proofs. Within proofs there are many many common techniques, aka "patterns."

Either way you seem to imply that "patterns" are for people who "build" things, which isn't emphasized in your definition below:

>"A pattern language is an organized and coherent set of patterns, each of which describes a problem and the core of a solution that can be used in many ways within a specific field of expertise. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized by his 1977 book A Pattern Language."

The problem with the above definition is that English vocabulary already communicates what a pattern does perfectly fine. What is the point coming up with an over complex name and postfixing all of these things with "pattern?" It's basically a redundant concept.

In fact, my communication with you at this very moment is employing many many common patterns. Check the pattern in the previous sentence "many many." I call it the double emphasis pattern and I've used that pattern twice in this reply. I'll write more about it in my book on Design patterns for English communication.

One of the underlying sources for 'smaller is better' is Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language". It also is the source that inspired the pattern movement in software. A pattern language is second in the series, and is a 1000+ page book with strong opinions on everything from City planning down to interior decorating. It is very much worth the read.

- knowing our neighbors

- usable mass transit

- energy efficiency

- interaction with government

It's the sort of area that I think has a lot of opportunity in it, but that opportunity isn't clearly something that could make you rich. So as a general area of focus, I think it'd be well worth a hacker's attention.

P.S. If you think cities, architecture, and the community shaped by those things are interesting, you should definitely read "A Pattern Language" by Christopher Alexander et al. It illuminates a lot of what goes on in cities and buildings in a very concise way, and will probably give you ideas to improve your home and environment.

We have a large-ish, well-lit open space, surrounded by several conference rooms. The open space is oriented in the overall space such that it's farthest from the door to minimize traffic. We're going to let each team (4-8 people) build out their own workspaces in the open area. They will organize the furniture, control how they physically interface with the rest of the space and other teams, etc. They'll have enough types of furniture to build walls, alcoves, desks, conference tables, social spaces, etc. As projects and teams change, adjustments can be made immediately.

I must say it's an exciting yet terrifying prospect, particularly because as with many existing spaces, it's not always possible to follow the prescriptive advice 100%. Additionally, almost no one has ever worked in an office space that is like the Alexander describes, which makes it somewhat of a leap of faith (in Peopleware we trust) that it will all work out.

If anyone else out there has already gone through this process, I'd love to hear how it's worked out for you.

This is the web page that got me into his work [http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Chris.furniture.html].

I wish I had the latter in my hands now for reference (it's at home), but from what I can recall, the book goes into great detail about how to solve specific problems using generalizable solutions. For example, to establish a connection between the space inside of a building with the space outside of the building, consider adding awnings with open archways to the perimeter.

The Design Patterns book, though wildly specific (possibly only because it can be), also deals with solving specific problems with generalizable solutions. For example, creating and ensuring only one instance of an object exists (Singleton - p. 127). The book outlines the motivation for this (e.g. the problem), and defines an abstract for the solution.

Also, the fact that more modern languages can more easily solve some the problems discussed in Design Patterns is, while true, seems like a bit of a red herring. Undoubtedly the patterns themselves have a lifetime of usefulness, and will evolve as we discover new ways of solving new (and old) problems.

The other reason I'd question your assumption is I'm an architect of the type that designs buildings. Though I don't practice much these days, I still keep one active license and one inactive license just for giggles and because it's occasionally more convenient to say "I'm an architect" when asked "What do you do?" than to describe what I actually do because I'm not exactly sure what that is beyond it being just the things I do.

There is (or was) a sort of standard student cannon in the US that included Ching's Form, Space and Order and Alexander's A Pattern Language. Alexander's work of course overlaps with software architecture, so it's "arguably" relevant either way -- though it's not a very interesting argument to me and so not one I'd wish to have.

The romanticizing issue is very visible, although you can also see it as a product of the dominant architectural mindset of the era the books were written in (or more accurately: a reaction to it). It's a lot easier to look past it with that in mind.

My personal opinion is that it better corresponds to current software architectural practice because whereas A Pattern Language is entirely focused on habitability for end users, both current software architectural practice and Notes on the Synthesis of Form emphasize habitability for the architect/programmer - e.g. three tiered systems make the job of the programmer easier, they don't necessarily improve user experience, but light on two sides does.

A pattern language is an organized and coherent set of patterns. They are developed holistically to work in relation with each other. They're designed to be combined together - as sequences, in parallel, as contrasts - and also to be as "platform-agnostic" as possible.

For example, Alexander's book helpfully includes a ton of points on how to combine the various patterns in the book, and a healthy "see also:" section to get alternative ideas or just areas of overlap between them all.

And the patterns in the book are about the physical, environmental, and social needs of humans (the problems) and how they can be met trough architecture and infrastructure.

It's very distinct from just "a list of patterns." They're always described in service to the whole, in relation to the others.

For the English language, I would say Aristotle's Rhetoric is closest in spirit; whereas Elements of Style is clearly more a "list of patterns"

Other "pattern language"-style books I can think of are The Prince by Machiavelli; Capital by Marx; 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing by Ries and Trout; Diffusion of Innovations by Rogers; and High Output Management by Andrew Grove.

I would also say the original C2 Wiki comes closest to creating a "bottoms-up" pattern language. Here's the entry on A Pattern Language - https://wiki.c2.com/?PatternLanguage

But these books aren't explicitly set up as pattern language books - nor are many others. Very few books (not even the GoF) are put together so well and as comprehensively as A Pattern Language. It's truly a masterpiece.

For instance, just building narrow streets is not "all we need to do" as the author states.

Full text available on Archive.org (but it's worth buying a copy for the illustrations alone): https://archive.org/stream/APatternLanguage/A_Pattern_Langua...

IMO, it is highly improbably that adequate structural analysis was done on all those small twisted members because branches and stunted trunks contain so many knots and so much sapwood.

On the positive side, the approach is straight out of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, and any victims of the inadequate structural design will be due to Darwinian forces.

http://www.patternlanguage.com/leveltwo/ca.htm

Later in life he studied the organizing principles of nature and well-man-made artifacts and discussed the common patterns in his books "On the nature of order" [1]. The ideas are perhaps more grandiose than this author is discussing, but also very interesting when applied to engineering.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-Environmental-...

http://downlode.org/Etext/Patterns/

To me, the biggest question in politics is: how do we build political / societal systems whose impact on human society is consistently positive and equitable?

This implies _fundamental_ changes in those systems. To wit: publicly-funded R&D returning value to the public purse, and not just to private companies (see: Mazzucato's "The Entrepreneurial State"); effective and highly coordinated wealth / corporate tax regimes (see: Piketty's "Capital in the Twenty-First Century"); complete transformation of education and its relationship to both human psychology and technology (see: Papert's "Mindstorms"); eradicating the very concept of "good" and "bad" neighborhoods through massive and equitable investment in schools, housing, mixed-use zoning, mixed-income development, multi-modal transit, functional green space, etc. (see: Alexander, Ishikawa, and Silverstein's "A Pattern Language"); and, backing it all, a modern, responsive, truly digital government that is empowered to invest in tools and technologies to continually improve both internal work and external service delivery (see: Cyd Harrell's "A Civic Technologist's Practice Guide").

This isn't to say that Alexander cannot inform a design. In fact, many architects look at his work during the process. But the kind of project which will look like the images in his book is rare simply because many of these patterns are best implemented "at run-time" by the user, rather than at "compile time" by the architect or planner.

Finally, I would say that what the programming community got from A Pattern Language is not Christopher Alexander, but Richard P. Gabriel. [http://www.dreamsongs.com/]

The "blind" part half way applies. You have to have faith that you recognized something that that is out of kilter, and you have to be blind to the fact that you don't know the solution.

    Gig: Americans Talk about Their Jobs
    The Tao of Pooh
    Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values
    Tao Te Ching
    A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction
    Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
    Novice to Master: An Ongoing Lesson in the Extent of My Own Stupidity
    How the Mind Works
    The Design of Everyday Things
    Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid
    The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less

Fiction is harder to pin down. I think, overall, reading fiction has had a greater impact on my understanding of human nature than non-fiction has. But it's diffused over a larger number of books so it's hard to point to specific ones. I think simply reading a large volume of fiction helps me understand all the ways people can live and think.

The Nature of Order series generalize even more, so I'd read them after that. They rather independent from the TWoB and APL but I believe the way from the concrete examples (APL) to the generalizations is a better one. Here it's rather a matter of preference than one of forward-dependency.

But these pattern catalogs present a risk of seeming complete. To believe that you're near completion on a list of patterns in any field is utter hubris. Alexander's own hubris at having discovered objectively "correct" architectural styles led him down a path towards obsolescence while the rest of the architectural discipline moved on. The hand wavy "scientific" surveys Alexander conducted wouldn't pass a basic social science methods review these days. Pseudoscientific methods of assembling anecdotes or interviews from small samples that don't control for sampling bias will always result in some interesting insights that can't be reliably generalized beyond the narrow scope from which they were gathered. That's what both of these pattern languages are. At best they are a handful of neat ideas that other practitioners can reuse. But these are not some sort of reliable canon. We're all going to have to do more rigorous research if that's what we want.

There might be another parallel in here about the fetishization of anachronisms. Alexander, who is an architect not a carpenter, goes out of his way to glorify hand-crafting things (literally avoiding power tools). Unless you're a carpenter who specializes in make "artisanal" works of art for wealthy patrons, I guarantee you'll enjoy the productivity gains of a pneumatic nail gun. So if you ever find yourself insisting that some old "pattern" is more pure at the expense of everyone else's productivity, double check whether your dogma is worth it.

TL;DR. Don't take patterns too seriously. Always look for new ones.

Anyway, in the actual practice of architecture, A Pattern Language is by far the best of the set. There are other books that make approximately the same case as Timeless Way of Building. [1] Most of it's fame is from standing in relation to A Pattern Language.

[1] e.g. How Buildings Learn, The Timeless Way of Seeing, Structure of the Ordinary, etc.

I would be interested in connecting with more people who understand and want to realize Christopher Alexander's ideas, and encourage anyone who reads Hacker News to get A Pattern Language. It's not really made to be a straight read. It's more like a library of architectural functions with comments on how to apply them. Good to have at hand. The problem is that to fully realize what is clearly a better solution than the burbs, you would need to collaborate with dozens of other people, who all understand the ideas.

Here's a couple of starting points for those unfamiliar with the architectural ideas:

http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/

https://www.patternlanguage.com/

Once you've established that the major scale is useful and in no way mysterious, then you can point out that if you divide the octave up in 12 logarithmically equal parts, you end up with equal tempered notes that almost line up with the ratio-based major scale. (I once threw together a diagram to illustate this that you can find here if you scroll down a bit: http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/cbg/justintonation.html) From then on, you can treat equal temperament as an approximation that implies the ratios you described at the beginning.

(Side note: One idea I try to impress on anyone who demonstrates the slightest inkling to write about music theory is that I really wish there existed something like Christopher Alexander's "A Pattern Language", but for music. Music is full of lots of little "tricks" that you can find scattered about in books, but I haven't ever seen anyone try to systematically collect as many of those as they can in one place, with a clear dependency graph.)

We are animals. We get physically and psychologically uncomfortable when our vision is restricted and our backs are exposed. It means we are vulnerable to predators. As such, cubicles are pretty much a nightmare.

[1] Christopher Alexander wrote about architecture, but his terminology was adopted by the design patterns movement in computer science, so it's familiar to most programmers. It's one of two building architecture books I recommend to programmers - the other is Stewart Brand's "How Buildings Learn".

Ambiguity isn’t sloppy in this context, it’s needed to allow room for contradictions to resolve. People make art out of trash, but the dump isn’t a museum, a museum is.

Christopher Alexander has arguably done more than any other human to help us understand why our built environments (physical and software) take the forms they take. 10 minutes flipping through A Pattern Language will clarify the underlying basis for the linked essay.

Edit: I've been wanting to read A Pattern Language for a while, but this snippet from Amazon made me chuckle. If I didn't know better, I would have given it a 50/50 shot of being from APL or GoF!

>The elements of this language are entities called patterns. Each pattern describes a problem which occurs over and over again in our environment, and then describes the core of the solution to that problem, in such a way that you can use this solution a million times over, without ever doing it the same way twice.

I'm particularly interested in what Alexander has to say about residential housing, and this strongly-worded opinion from A Pattern Language in particular has always intrigued me:

“In any urban area, no matter how dense, keep the majority of buildings four storeys high or less. It is possible that certain buildings should exceed this limit, but they should never be buildings for human habitation.”

Alexander goes on to argue that high rise living can be socially isolating:

“High rise living takes people away from the ground and away from the casual, everyday society that occurs on the sidewalks and streets and on the grounds and porches. It leaves them alone in their apartments. The decision to go out for some public life becomes formal and awkward; and unless there is some specific task which brings people out in the world, the tendency is to stay home, alone.”

The arguments sound quite convincing, but I’m not sure I agree entirely with the four storey limit. I think there are also cultural and social factors that contribute to whether high-rise living is a success or a failure. For example, how well are housing blocks stitched into the fabric of the urban landscape (instead of situated, isolated, outside of urban centres)?

And in some countries (e.g. Hong Kong and Singapore) high-rise living is a necessity. Having said that, it is also a mistake to assume that high-rise building is the only answer to high-density development e.g. https://imgur.com/LmJ1tTg (from a book called At Home in the City: an introduction to urban design)

There is a clear political vision in Alexander's work, one whose basis is participation and non-alienation. This is at odds with modern capitalism, which prevents its success.

The free software movement, too, is in a sense unsuccessful, despite a loyal and tenacious following. Still, it's worth fighting for and preserving.

Software has been in an acknowledged crisis for decades. Ordinary folks I know aren't thrilled about contemporary architecture.

Also, Alexander emphasizes that his "prescriptive" works, such as A Pattern Language, are made as examples of how grassroots human knowledge can be conceptualized and presented in a certain composable form.

http://books.google.com/books?id=hwAHmktpk5IC&&pg=PA110

I'm actually surprised it hasn't been done before now, we've had the technology for a while. (It's not clear from the brief write-up if this one is a private company or municipal service).

The entry from A Pattern Language has stuck with me as a good idea (and because it was rather atypical for the other patterns Alexander included, this is the only one i recall that's so overtly related to IT). Alexander's version predates cell/smartphones phones as well as the powerful computers of the 21st century;. it assumes you still need some fixed 'stops' with phones next to them for people to call for dispatch. But the basic idea of routing small busses based on demand and shared rides, using computer software to make it feasible, is there.

But there is an enormous difference between his real idea of "design patterns" and the much more static idea that you see in, for example, the Gang of Four book. The easiest way to see this is to consider that the methods and goals of "A Pattern Language" are centered around making buildings that add to the quality of human life (and the first few patterns deal with the goal of world peace), and would be totally useless to someone building a gulag. Whereas the patterns in the GoF book are just about preventing code duplication, and would find themselves just as useful in a program for violating people's privacy as one designed with a more benign purpose.

Nearby shelf:
The Design of Everyday Things,
Maverick,
Founders at work,
A Brief History of Time,
A Pattern Language,
Peopleware,
Made to stick,
Web Standards Solutions,
Designing Interactions,
The Pragmatic Programmer,
The Mythical Man-Month,
Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Other good reads:
Blink,
Tipping Point,
Long Tail,
Freakonomics

* The Design of Everyday Things
* Design for the Real World
* A Pattern Language
* Notes on the Synthesis of Form
* Never Leave Well Enough Alone
* Don't Make Me Think
* How Things Don't Work
* Usable Usability
* The Visual Display of Quantitative Information
* A Theory of Fun for Game Design

Other left-field books I've found myself going back to for design inspiration more than I would've thought

* The Death and Life of Great American Cities
* The Philosophy of Andy Warhol
* Influence by Robert Caldini
* Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
* The Art of Looking Sideways
* Cosmos
* Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth
* The Theory of Moral Sentiments

And just specifically for computer UX, Smashing UX Design is a pretty good crash course.

Read these:
* The Timeless Way of Building (1979)
* A Pattern Language (1977)
* The Nature of Order (vols 1-4, 2002-2005)

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander#Published...

And that makes this exercise impossible for me. The books I would tell the younger version of myself to read wouldn't resonate the same way (or not at all) with that other person I used to be. Picking books that might have appealed to the younger version of myself accurately would mean picking the books I actually read -- e.g. The Fifth Discipline -- and not books that the younger version of myself tried to read but couldn't but that I read and recommend today: e.g. TAoCP.

Part of the complexity is that the world in which I read books today is radically different from that of my younger self. Today I can get a MIX interpreter from the internet [1]...there's even help on StackOverflow. My younger self couldn't because even in the time when there was an internet bandwidth was low and Google didn't exist.

Like I said it's great to pick up a good book and realize it is better than I remember when I remember it being really good, but it's hard to see how it could have been better for my younger self.

1. Neuromancer

2. Blood Meridian

3. A Pattern Language

[1]:https://apps.ubuntu.com/cat/applications/precise/mixal/

Fucking terrible idea. I almost certainly know more about mental illness than you do. What makes people crazy in urban areas is expensive real estate. It's not signing the ridiculous rent checks that does it-- that's just annoying. However, moving involuntarily-- especially when due to adverse economic circumstances-- has a huge detrimental effect on mental health, even inducing illnesses such as schizophrenia[0] which might otherwise be thought to be purely biological.

[0] Schizophrenia, like cancer and depression, probably isn't one disease. There are at least 5 different schizophrenias.

Next to genetics and drug abuse, the strongest predictor for mental illness is whether a person had to move involuntarily for economic reasons. Traditionally, this was a cause for the high rate of mental illness in urban areas. (However, the recent housing catastrophe was a mostly suburban phenomenon; we'll see in about 10 years if that results in suburban MI levels exceeding urban ones)

If you ban high-rises, real estate costs become extreme. Just look at what it costs to live in the Village if you don't believe me. Or look at San Francisco's problem. It's not nearly as dense as New York, but almost as expensive because of the NIMBY assholes.

Bad bad bad fucking idea.

Parnas’ ”On the Criteria To Be Used in Decomposing Systems into Modules” https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/spring2003/cmsc838p/Design/crit... [PDF]

Christopher Alexander’s Notes on the Synthesis of Form http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674627512

Both get deep into how a design emerges from the relationships among what Antirez is calling "sub-tasks". Antirez refers briefly to these relationships in the "Design sacrifice section." Parnas and Alexander put them, correctly I believe, at the heart of the craft.

Parnas was a software engineering authority. Alexander went on to write A Pattern Language, from which the software community derived "design patterns" as a foundational idea.

Antipatterns are on rather firmer academic ground than the guy at the airport barstool. Antipatterns are simply a negative version of design patterns. Design patterns in software started with the book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object Oriented Software (aka Gang of Four or GoF), one of the greatest classic works in software engineering. GoF was itself based on the book A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, a classic of the architectural field.

Alexander came up with the idea of a "pattern language" to describe patterns in architecture, a formal structure for observable phenomena. The GoF reused pattern language in a formal way to describe software patterns. Part of the pattern language describes how to implement the pattern. Antipatterns first appeared in the book Antipatterns: Refactoring Software, Architectures, and Projects in Crisis. Again, pattern language was used, including patterns for solving the problems caused by the antipattern.

So yes, this is rigorous. Not math-rigorous, but rigorous.

For example, one of Alexander's patterns is to make buildings not more than four stories tall. He presents compelling evidence that living in tall buildings increases rates of mental illness and stunts physical and intellectual growth of children, and explains why the 5th floor is one too many. He is not saying, "maybe you should use the four floors pattern here," he is saying, "buildings should not be this tall!"

Another example is that homes on a street should somewhat cluster together and their doors should face each other. What is the equivalent in software of shaping a street to create a few small communities this way, not as an option but simply as the better way to make a street?

I know we don't wish to be dogmatic about things like REST, but the power of Alexander's ideas come from the superiority of his specific patterns over other ideas, not just his power to organize the practice of a profession into patterns.

The original idea behind the "Design Patterns movement" was to provide a common language for describing recurring concepts in software design. It's the same idea behind Alexander's "A Pattern Language", which is something else you should read.

Nobody is arguing that describing things a little more rigorously is bad. But a lot of people have problems with the way "engineers" and "architects" abuse the pattern concept.

Alexander did not write a book that claimed you could build an entire city by picking out a "44. Local Town Hall" and mixing it with a "69. Public Outdoor Room". He had an idea, that the cart was dragging the horse in architecture, and attempted to use vocabulary to reframe the discussion about why specific choices were being made.

The Gang of Four introduced a minor corruption in that approach --- they had no fundamental thesis about how software should be designed, only a notion that there was folkloric knowledge that should be captured and named --- but their followers completed the corruption wholeheartedly. Instead of a language describing software, the GoF patterns became a perscription for building it.

And so we have Ruby code that includes a "singleton" module into classes, and SOAP4R code that includes "factory" classes (note again how ruby already transparently supports the abstract factory concept), and people argung that we should start "doing a little engineering" by pulling these clumsy ideas back off the shelf.

I can't argue this any better than Norvig can. In fact, I'll invoke him again by suggesting that you don't want to end up like Norvig's "opponent" in the sudoku-solving contet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pattern_language

The ideas in that book helped create the notion of "design patterns" in software and engineering. The book provides hundreds of insights into the way people use their environment: marriage beds, child caves, dancing in the streets, staircases as stages, sleeping in public, spaces for self-governance...

Pattern Language is a more humanizing design philosophy than Bauhaus. It brings the emotional and sociological aspects of design together with technological complexity.

The concepts of vocabulary, syntax and grammar are applicable to programming language and API design, as well as visual design and architecture.

Yes, it’s not as blocky and snap-together as Lego, but I always considered that an artifact of the need for adaptability/evolution, flexibility to allow things to fit into environments of random complexity, and accommodating a wide array of human preferences.

“Programming”, like architecture/planning of the physical environment, seems to have turned out to need this degree of granularity, nearly indistinguishable from an organic system.

Guessing you're referring to something by Christopher Alexander, Notes on the Synthesis of Form or A Pattern Language? Those predate your timeline by a few decades but I couldn't find anything else that fit. Whatever it is, I don't think it has quite the seminality in software architecture that you imply...

I write programs with Design Patterns, I catalogue new ones from my work, I use them to teach and communicate. "A Pattern Language" is one of my favourite books.

What did I say? Well, I quoted someone else telling a story about their experience:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/12/newly-discovered-design-...

I thought it was a good story because it illustrated two different mind sets when it comes to writing programs and what happens when they come into contact with each other. There's no preachy conclusion, it's a human interest story.

I also talked about a particular cultural approach in this post:

http://weblog.raganwald.com/2007/12/pouring-water-back-into-...

There, I expressed opposition to the idea of a fixed set of standard patterns.

So, now you know what I was saying.

Christopher Alexander mentioned an effect similar to this in "A Pattern Language". The result is due to something different though: less stoplights, less stops! In this case the problem is related to edge network flow.

With the Monks Wood rewilding in mind, I wonder how we could transition urban areas toward a city country finger pattern. Though perhaps there should be three kinds of fingers: city, agriculture, and wilderness. Alexander's "country" is just farmland, though he envisions its recreational use too.