[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.)