All 253 Patterns from Christopher Alexander's a Pattern Language Summarized

68 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by toomuchtodo
(claytondorge.com)

12 Comments

maCDzP

an hour ago

I work in civil engineering and tinker with computers as a hobby. I found Alexander’s work delightful. It really helped me think about my profession and my hobby and how they tie together.

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.

shoo

44 minutes ago

> I haven’t seen those thoughts about community when I have read about patterns in SWE

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.

jmalicki

an hour ago

A lot of people talk about building software "ecosystems". But that's more management/marketing than SWE, but that's where you build similar scale. You have Linux, products built on Linux, software written for Linux, sub-communities like KDE, etc. and how you build those communities and allow both diversity for different ideas, but with a shared common core and how that evolves.

But that's like an upper management type concern, you usually don't call that "SWE" anymore.

keithnz

4 hours ago

worth checking this out from 1996 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA kind of ironic he was moving away from patterns to more fundamental concepts just as the software world was just discovering patterns. I think his shift to these more fundamental concepts is a much better way to think about design.

readthenotes1

3 hours ago

Alexander's thesis Notes on the Synthesis of Form contained the description of the design techniques, low coupling and high cohesion that were later brought into software in the mid-60s.

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.

orthoxerox

2 hours ago

Not "life", "wholeness". I also quit midway through the second book out of four, too much woo.

JSR_FDED

8 hours ago

This is amazing, other than minor quibbles I think this has captured every aspect of what makes places at every scale good for humans to inhabit.

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?

queuebert

4 hours ago

I highly recommend getting the full book. This should be required reading for every housing developer. If you ever felt like a house or community was uncomfortable or made you subconsciously unhappy, you might find the reason in this book.

gumby

6 hours ago

Why, really? Each pattern is barely a page or two long (well, with a picture it spills over). The point is already to be brief, but also provide some context. Just reading one lets you muse on the concept and see if it fits with gig. The same technique was used in The Society of Mind for the same reason.

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.