
“A pattern language” explained (2016) - simonebrunozzi
https://www.permaculture.co.uk/articles/pattern-language-explained
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oldmancoyote
I have been an admirer of Alexander's _A Pattern Language_ book on
architecture for 40 years.

Even then, this is new to me. I recommend you read this article, even though
it's deep and difficult. It can be read as a fundamental criticism of UI/UX as
it's practiced today. In particular it could be seen as a rejection of
Jonathan Ive's (Apple's) design principles, principles which I have
increasingly found disturbing and lacking in human relevance.

~~~
simonebrunozzi
An interesting question would be: after 40+ years, what happened? Has the book
positively impacted how we build homes, neighborhoods, cities? (I'd say very
little)

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madhadron
Alexander himself agrees with you. The pattern language approach in his hands
and in the hands of some architects was a tool that produced wonderful
buildings. In many hands, the patterns were there and the buildings were still
miserable. The patterns were necessary but not sufficient. I posted a comment
elsewhere in the thread referring to his recent work, 'The Nature of Order',
where he thinks, after forty years of work, that he's figured out the
sufficient part as well.

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theoh
Here is an impressive review of a huge number of scholarly critiques of
Christopher Alexander's work:
[https://cityterritoryarchitecture.springeropen.com/articles/...](https://cityterritoryarchitecture.springeropen.com/articles/10.1186/s40410-017-0073-1)

Personally, I've never been able to take him seriously enough to work up the
patience to analyse his work to anything like that level of depth. His project
is hubristic.

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madhadron
I got half way through that article, and everything up to that point had been
strawmen, so I gave up.

As for hubris, what is hubristic about trying to figure out how to build well?

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wwarner
I agree that self-assembly, auto (as in self) generation is what's lacking.
Not sure what form it would take in software, but I feel that all the seams in
man-made objects are limiting progress in tangible forms large and small. I
suppose in software, these boundaries are apis and protocols, which ought to
be stitched together in a more organic, self-learning way.

~~~
jdc
Would be nice to have a meta-protocol to negotiate protocols. Probably looks
something like game-theory.

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madhadron
If this resonates at all with you, go get Alexander's four volume work 'The
Nature of Order.' And stick with it. It's a lot of ground to cover. The goal,
as always for him, is to be able to construct built environments with a
timeless, life enhancing quality, and he spends volume one demonstrating that
the quality is repeatable among individual observers and then constructing a
system of analysis to let understand what drives repeatable observation.

Then volume two is about how you go about constructing environments with this
quality. If you have a hard time, flip ahead to the sequence for constructing
a Japanese tea house. Volume three is how you do this in practice, and how you
set up the logistics and project management so it is possible. Volume four
tries to construct a mindset which lets the approaches in volume three emerge
as obvious behaviors.

Each is a step back: here is this desirable, repeatable quality; here is how
you generate a state with this quality; here is how you generate systems that
generate states with this quality; here is how you generate societies that
generate such systems.

It's utterly brilliant. And I want to warn off everyone planning to translate
it immediately to software. There are sequences of unfolding that we can
develop and use (I've got some notes I've been working on), but the quality
that we are trying to generate is not the same. The timeless, life
supportingness that Alexander analyzes is driven utterly by Euclidean
geometry. Software architecture is not. There is a quality that we are looking
for and that, much more about melding invisibly into the domain and being
adaptable as the domain adapts. I really think that the quality we're looking
for is buried in relations among Wittgenstein's language games, not in
geometry.

I also think we would benefit from looking a little further afield than just
constructive sequences. He talks about the Tahitian canoe maker's chant which
gives the order of unfolding of making a canoe. Let's compare that to the Epic
of Lata, used by the sailors of the windward Solomon islands as their sailing
instructions and protocol when sailing the alien looking Vaka o Lata (see
[http://vaka.org/](http://vaka.org/)). When they are embarked, they take the
roles of characters in the epic and reenact the parts of it that correspond to
what's going on. In the wonderful book 'How Buildings Learn' (if you like
Alexander, you'll love that one), there are vernaculars documented of how
traditional houses of various kinds expand in repeatable ways over their
lifespan. Similarly, we spend more time adapting software and operating
software than we do building software from scratch, so our unfoldings will
need to be much more shaped by a vernacular driving how a system gets
reshaped.

Mind you, I may just be sleepy and that rambling may be totally
inconsequential and useless.

~~~
pdamoc
"Thriving Systems Theory and Metaphor-Driven Modeling" (see
[https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781849963015](https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9781849963015)
) is a book that attempts to bring the ideas from the Nature of Order in the
world of software.

~~~
madhadron
Interesting. I'll have to read it and see if gets somewhere useful.

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simonebrunozzi
Just finished watching a great 1996 lecture by Christopher Alexander:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-
_zfA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA)

I recommend it for those who have read his work, but never seen or heard the
man in action.

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drumttocs8
A Pattern Language is required reading. Ever since reading it I've dreamed of
making some kind of rule-based generative architecture program- where a
building is created according to selected patterns.

~~~
oldmancoyote
Hmmmm. Interesting.

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RockofStrength
Reminds me of meta-algebra. For example, a^n - b^n = (a - b)(a^(n-1) +
(a^(n-2))ab + ... b^(n-1)) .

