Christopher Alexander on Pattern Language for Developers
There is this remarkable talk by recently deceases famous architect Christopher Alexander he gave in October of 1996, at The 1996 ACM Conference on Object-Oriented Programs, Systems, Languages and Applications. If you are to busy to watch it in full, here is a short write up.
If you are in Software or Information Architecture fields you probably know the fascination of professionals by Christopher Alexander’s Patter Language.
What Alexander said in his talk is basically, that it nice that you are interested in patterns language, but you guys took the notation, name-context-problem-solution, and ignored that rest of the intent he and his collogues were after.
Pattern language “as designed” was about three essential features:
- Moral preoccupation with making things good, and allowing people to thrive in the presence of those things.
- Aim to create coherence in the things which are build with it.
- Aim to allow people create new morally sound, coherent and whole things and objects. This makes the whole process recursive: build good things to allow next generation on builders build good thing.
You will need to watch the talk to understand that Alexander means by ‘good things’.
He was not sure that people in software and digital are concerned about it at all.
He notes that, in his opinion, architects of real physical objects screwed our environment, rooms, buildings, streets, cities, and there is not way for them to unscrew it back to be good. There is too much build environment and too many norms and policies to change something in foreseeable future.
Alexander was hoping that this can be avoided when we build places made of code and information, if only software people took pattern language and his later work on the Nature of Order seriously. Software people can change the order of things. And it is kind of big deal because software is altering and controlling all aspects of life.
When the automobile came along, the people who built the buggies for the horse and buggy did not then turn into Henry Ford. Henry Ford knew nothing about horse buggies. The people who were building automobiles came from left field, and then took over — and the horse and buggy died off.
That was 1996. 12 years before myspace and Facebook. Eleven years before Marc Andreessen will coin his famous “Software is eating the world”. So, how are we doing, folks? Are we wining? Or we royally screwed it up? Are we making the things good for the other to make things event better? How is blockchain doing? Will Metaverse be good? (That’s a big fat ‘no’ from me).
