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 alw

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.