From the Guardian...
The architect Christopher Alexander, who has died aged 85, saw buildings and cities as living frameworks for human beings. Through designing, building, teaching and writing, he sought "to provide a complete working alternative to our present ideas about architecture, building and planning".
[...] A housing project in the barrios of Lima, the capital of Peru, in 1969 began with his team living for five weeks with different families on site, observing the details of daily life, to develop what he called a "pattern language" of 67 principles that formed the basis for the design.
[...] His approach provided the basis of an architecture bestseller, A Pattern Language (1977). Each of 253 "patterns", with its own number, describes a helpful relationship between parts of the environment, and consists of a title – such as Public Outdoor Room, South Facing Outdoors or Windows Overlooking Life – explanatory text, diagrams and photographs. The patterns are linked to each other in a network structure, which gave the book an appeal to the software developers among its general readership.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04 2022, @02:04PM
Got this from a friend last week,
http://www.patternlanguage.com/leveltwo/archivesframe.htm?/leveltwo/../archives/ieee/ieee.htm [patternlanguage.com]
I have an undergrad degree in architecture, and used Alexander's Pattern Language book. Later Alexander and his group published a second series on the same topics, but at a broader level, all discussed in his wiki entry,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Alexander [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 5, Interesting) by gznork26 on Monday April 04 2022, @04:00PM
Just yesterday, while scrubbing our bookshelves of titles that could go away, I got to three by Christopher Alexander: "A Pattern Language", "A Timeless Way of Building", and "The Oregon Experiment". There was no question... I'd no sooner part with them than with Kaufman's "A Fortran Coloring Book", Leonard Shlan's "Art & Physics: Parallel Visions in Space, Time & Light", or Douglas R. Hofstadter's "Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid".
If you've been taught how to think, or learned it on your own, you're drawn to material that lives in the intersections: to know one thing, study another.
Khipu were Turing complete.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04 2022, @04:04PM (2 children)
I liked patterns at first, until I realized they do little to help build software. Even then I held that they assist in technical communication, until I realized they get used as a either an interview question, a stand-in for real communication, or an attempt to look sophisticated. Like the title says, sorry the dude died, but not sorry the era passed.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 04 2022, @04:28PM
Patterns are a useful match in some disciplines, not in others.
In architecture, they offer good abstractions for a treatment of space. In programming, they're a terrible means of trying to work around the cracks in OOP.
In fact, you could pretty much write the history of the last three decades in programming as repeated efforts to work around the cracks in OOP. (Hi, UML, didn't see you there!)
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday April 04 2022, @06:32PM
All I can say is that I have never found a tool that was one size fits all. But I have found OOP and patterns to have widespread application - for example, I used them in the past for math modeling and working with a high level transaction system. It implemented in a useful way things I needed, like modularity and inheritance.
But I can think of a variety of areas where these things don't work well or are unnecessary. OOP for tight constraints (like embedded and real time systems) or stuff so dirt simple (a stateless functions that compute stuff only one way).
Similarly with patterns if your thing is that you take data A and return result B, then any attempt to put that into a more complex pattern is kind of a waste of time. But the stuff I talked about naturally organizes itself into patterns.