I think we are still waiting for a Christopher Alexander of software. What he did for architecture should also be done for software design. I'm not sure it's po

I think we are still waiting for a Christopher Alexander of software. What he did for architecture should also be done for software design. I'm not sure it's possible--the aesthetics are different--but I would love to see it happen. The GoF Design Patterns was a good start, but they did not really lay the same kind of groundwork that Alexander did before and after he wrote his seminal Pattern Languages. As for the Quality Without a Name, it is here where the rubber really hits the road. How to tackle it? How to give it a better philosophical grounding? I think the aesthetic angle that Alexander chose to describe it was great and part of his genius. It attracted and still attracts a certain kind of person, similar to what attracts people to books like the Zen of Motorcycle Maintenance, or any Zen of ... book--as evidenced by the multiple references to such books in the linked wiki page. I'm not sure, however, if this is the right way to present or approach a "metaphysics of software design." Without going into too much detail, I think it would be better to connect Alexander's notion of the QWAN to the Platonic and Neoplatonic "One." There the three transcendentals of goodness, beauty, and truth were contrasted against each other to see how they were different shades (or emanations) of the that one singular thing or quality. Doing so, might give us a way to apply Alexander's ideas more broadly than his aesthetic approach.