[no_identd]

To quote Dorian Taylor[no affiliation, albeit we do follow each other on Twitter & BlueSky] from https://twitter.com/doriantaylor/status/1585008553554677762:

"Chances are if you're in software or digital design, you've heard of the book A Pattern Language, well, you may not be aware that Christopher Alexander effectively renounced patterns in 1996 (https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA). He said he had something better…

The problem is, that better something happens to be four books and 2500 pages, and weigh 12 pounds. And, it's about buildings, not software. So my service to you is interpreting the text for software, and cutting the reading down by an order of magnitude."

That "something better" being Christopher Alexander's Opus Magnum, "The Nature of Order". Dorian's working on this under the name "The Nature of Software" here:

https://the.natureof.software/

And here:

https://buttondown.email/natureofsoftware/

[hyggetrold]

I think it's worth it for people to start by reading Alexander's writing themselves first before relying on synthesis. Alexander's aim was not simply "good ways of building things." I also think it's important for folks not to think that software and buildings are so different that the work needs translation. Alexander was after universal principles, after all.

A Pattern Language is great but a lot of folks miss that it's part 2 of a greater work, with part 1 being The Timeless Way of Building.

Another great Alexander book that flies under the radar is Notes on the Synthesis of Form. It's a little hard to read but there is deep deep insight about design and the design process in that little book. Highly recommend.

And lastly, anyone interested should read A City Is Not A Tree: https://www.patternlanguage.com/archive/cityisnotatree.html

[dorian]

If you're going to read the whole Alexander corpus (which I did minus the two hardest-to-find volumes—the Linz Café and the one about carpets), be prepared for it to take on the order of years. While there is for sure a lot of repetition, the insights are frustratingly smeared across the entire thing.

Moreover, there is a clear arc to Alexander's career that goes a little like:

• Mathematical era (PhD/Notes on the Synthesis of Form, A City is not a Tree)

• Pattern era (Timeless Way, APL, and about four case studies)

• 15 properties era (Nature of Order)

As one might expect, a lot of the earlier work is recapitulated in the later work, but the fact that he explicitly deprecated patterns at his OOPSLA 1996 keynote (https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA ) is important. People are aware of APL because of Gang of Four and Richard Gabriel etc but not so much that lecture.

As for the fifteen properties in Nature of Order, they mainly concern Euclidean geometry and the ordinary physics one would associate with constructing actual buildings. The evidence that they would need to be adapted to a more generic semiotic-topological domain such as software is the fact that Alexander himself saw fit to draw up (in Book 4) eleven analogous properties pertaining exclusively to colour (a 1:1 correspondence except for four which coalesce two of the geometric properties each). Concepts like "life", "wholeness", "center", "the fundamental differentiating process" etc. can be used unchanged.

[hyggetrold]

I really wanted to read the work about carpets also and even found a copy available online. The price was massive sticker shock however and I couldn't justify buying it.

I love that OOPSLA lecture, incidentally. In my view the software industry really missed the mark on what Alexander was outlining there.

[dorian]

Yeah, it was about a thousand bucks the last time I checked and probably more now that he's passed. Why I ultimately didn't feel too bad about not reading it was because from what I understand, its contents are ostensibly mostly covered in Nature of Order. Same goes for Linz Café. I am, however, glad I read The Mary Rose Museum because it has a contract in it (excerpted in Nature of Order) that inspired me to write my own service contract "from scratch" (for some value of the term).

As for the software industry, it really latched on to patterns because (and Alexander himself nails it) they offer both a format and a formula for exchanging ideas that are either too ephemeral to write into a library, or otherwise transcend particular languages/frameworks. A lot of the really important insights though appear to have been lost in the process. (I have the Gang of Four book and a Fowler book, and have found neither to be especially useful.)

[hyggetrold]

Same - when I saw the carpet book for sale it was over a thousand. Looks like a beautiful book but that is a lot of money.

Have you visited any of Alexander's buildings? I still need to get out and see some.

I saw a lecture from Kent Beck (a huge proponent of Alexander as you probably well know) and he talks about going to the University of Oregon and being inspired by the architecture. As the story goes, he then learned about Alexander but was too poor a college student to afford any of the books. So he read Timeless Way and Pattern Language standing at the shelf in the student bookstore. I like that story because I feel it illustrates the power of Alexander's work - if it grabs you, then it really grabs you.

[dorian]

Haven't visited any because the majority are private residences (although this one in Berkeley-ish has been on and off the market https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/700-Hillside-Ave-Albany-C... ). The only ones you can just go to are West Dean in the UK and Eishin just outside Tokyo (which IIRC you need an appointment for). I suppose there's also the Fresno farmer's market but that's barely a building.

(You may also be able to go to the Mexicali compound which is apparently still standing: https://maps.app.goo.gl/UkwKqYDrGBcfQLnd6 but don't know what the story is with it.)

[no_identd]

Addendum:

He also has a good retrospective or précis (medium-length expository summary) on Christopher Alexander, how his views changed, and his work, here:

https://dorian.substack.com/p/at-any-given-moment-in-a-proce...

[btbuildem]

I don't know that he "renounced" patterns -- throughout the Nature of Order tetralogy, he refers to many of these patterns when discussing a multitude of examples that appear in these books.

The central tenet of Nature of Order (as far as I understand it) is that spaces can support life, that there's a certain liveliness to structure, "life" as a quality. The presence or absence of patterns is used throughout to argue the extent to which a certain space or structure has this quality.

It's all quite esoteric and wonderful at the same time. Most challenging books I've ever attempted to read.

[dorian]

He literally says (at 39:48 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA&t=2388s) "And it's because [the patterns are] only really fragmentary perceptions of this deeper structure that I'm describing [i.e., centers, the 15 properties…], that they are ultimately unsatisfactory; I think they're not capable of delivering the goods." So maybe not an outright renunciation per se, but definitely a deprecation.

[dorian]

Thanks for bringing attention to this; I just released Chapter 8: Deep Interlock & Ambiguity. Gonna try to get Chapter 9 (Contrast) out on a reasonable schedule.

[salynchnew]

My first thought when seeing this link was "Oh look! HN is repping that cool book about buildings."