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The title immediately reminded me of Alexander's "Nature of Order" [1]; HN audience might know him as the proto-father of software patterns who, allegedly, insp
by 9214 7y ago
The title immediately reminded me of Alexander's "Nature of Order" [1]; HN audience might know him as the proto-father of software patterns who, allegedly, inspired GoF (although he himself is an architect).
First part of Gabriel's book [2] offers an interesting perspective on that matter, from software engineering point of view.
[1]: http://www.natureoforder.com/overview.htm http://www.natureoforder.com/overview.htm
[2]: http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf http://dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
- siegecraft 7y agoFirst thing I thought of as well as I know one of the projects that Alexander wrote an entire book chronicling was the Eishin campus (http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/eishincampus.htm http://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/eishincampus.htm). These architects don't seem to have the same values as Alexander, though, for anyone hoping to find similar work.
- 9214 7y agoHe covers Eishin campus at great length in 2nd volume IIRC. And indeed, metabolists are on the opposite side of the spectrum.
- paloaltokid 7y agoFrank Lloyd Wright kinda-sorta has similar values. But for sure in a much different way than Alexander.
- paloaltokid 7y agoFor anyone interested, Christopher Alexander was a huge influence on Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck. You can draw a fairly straight line from Alexander's ideas to new stuff like wiki, Extreme Programming, design patterns, refactoring, etc. For a very prescient talk by Alexander in 1996 to a bunch of ACM folks, see this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA