[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.

[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."