I like his point about Alexander going after delegation of design decisions, though I don't necessarily think that's the only point he was driving at. From "The

I like his point about Alexander going after delegation of design decisions, though I don't necessarily think that's the only point he was driving at. From "The Timeless Way of Building" I got that he's also driving at this: 1. Modern (not necessarily just modernist) architects are generally terrible at achieving what Alexander refers to as "living space" because they're solving for the wrong things. 2. Small-scale patterns and large-scale patterns can constructively or destructively interfere with each other from urban planning right down to construction details of a room. 3. If you've really mastered design, you can leave behind the pattern language and cookie-cutter implementations: your solutions will organically develop with these large-scale/small-scale synergies. I'd suggest that GoF is a little closer to Alexander in these respects than the presenter gives credit for, particularly for point #3. The book studiously makes the point that its implementation of these patterns is not meant to be the only way to implement them. It also makes no attempt to be an exhaustive catalog. The fact that some of these patterns have standard and different implementations in other languages (e.g. iterator method hooks and generators in Python) doesn't necessarily mean that the pattern itself is useless outside of its OOP niche. I'm glad WikiWikiWeb is back up so we can debate all of this on the one true forum for debating design patterns. :-)