
A City Is Not a Tree (1965) [pdf] - brudgers
http://www.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexander-A-city-is-not-a-tree.pdf?version=new
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dunkelheit
This seems to be a very general observation beautifully explained using the
example of a city. Human mind likes trees very much because they can be
efficiently processed using divide-and-conquer approach. But any tree-like
structure used as a description of actual reality runs into its limitations
very quickly.

Something to be aware of as a systems designer.

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brudgers
Christopher Alexander also wrote _A Pattern Language_ which was one of the
inspirations for Beck and Cunningham's thoughts about software design
patterns. Alexander is both an architect and mathematician.

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skilesare
His most recent and probably more important work on the Nature of Order:

[http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-
Environmental-...](http://www.amazon.com/Nature-Order-Phenomenon-
Environmental-
Structure/dp/0972652914/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1438434176&sr=8-1&keywords=nature+of+order)

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ThrustVectoring
I found the semi-lattice vs tree distinction a very good way of thinking about
the systems engineering goal of breaking a project into non-overlapping tasks.
The ideal is to get a tree-structure, and not the more complicated semi-
lattice.

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sitkack
Making trees out of stuff that isn't naturally a tree complects things. I
think regularity and orthogonality trumps a hierarchical decomposition.

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sukilot
HN title-formatting code doesn't properly handle domain abbreviation for .tw
TLD

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dang
Good catch! Thanks; should be fixed now.

