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And you’ve misread the whole concept of my post. There’s nothing wrong with finding parallels with different disciplines. I don’t recall saying that at all. My

And you’ve misread the whole concept of my post. There’s nothing wrong with finding parallels with different disciplines. I don’t recall saying that at all. My gripe is that different discipline always seems to be architecture and the design patterns topic has been talked to death for over 50 years now.

mxkopy 4y ago
Such a strange gripe to have. Architecture as a default comparison makes sense on many levels. You don't make blueprints for pottery. The level of 'coincidental' design is much lower in architecture than it is in painting. There are much more specified 'primitives' that you can use in architecture that directly reflect the capabilities of the construction, etc. And even before programming architecture was used metaphorically. 'Architecting a plan' and all that. It's not too difficult to understand how design in architecture differs from design in other areas, in a way that makes using it as a metaphor useful.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
  > And even before programming architecture was used metaphorically. 'Architecting a plan' and all that. The verbing of "architect" is relatively recent, and certainly comes after programming. Historically, and outside the USA, one generally designs a plan, you do not architect it. Architects design buildings, they do not architect them. Some kinds of software involve designing an architecture.
  - mxkopy 4y ago
    Not only are you nitpicking, you are also wrong. https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/07/architectural-criticism.html https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/07/architectural-cri... We should add that the use of “architect” as a verb isn’t a recent phenomenon. The Oxford English Dictionary has written examples going back to the early 1800s. The earliest example in the OED is from a July 23, 1818, letter that the poet John Keats wrote to his brother Thomas after visiting Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Here’s how a poem in the letter describes the cave and its distinctive basalt columns: “This was architected thus / By the great Oceanus.” Your view of language is incredibly prescriptive. If I want to, I can say architects architect buildings. There's nothing wrong with that. If there's a useful distinction between designing and architecting then there's 0 reason I shouldn't bring attention to it. For example. If 'to architect' is synonymous with 'design', would you say someone architects a logo?
    - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
      You are welcome to say whatever you like, with whatever words you like. Yes, this may have been common practice in the early 1800s, and earlier. It ceased to be common practice in the Anglophone world for most of the 20th century, and only re-emerged in the software development community in the final decade of that century. The fact that a particular language habit existed at some point in time is often worth making to people who don't realize that language changes and shifts. But if you're going to do that, I think it wise to also acknowledge that the changes and shifts also involve particular language habits falling out of general use.
      - mxkopy 4y ago
        At the end of the day language is a carrier for meaning, that's all it is. Its history doesn't matter unless it confers meaning in some way (which it often does). In my opinion saying 'architecting' is meaningfully different from 'designing'. If people don't generally do that, then their loss is the shade of meaning that that difference implies
ssivark 4y ago
> I don’t recall saying that at all. My gripe is that different discipline always seems to be architecture and the design patterns topic has been talked to death for over 50 years now. I concur with the spirit of this gripe. While architecture certainly might be ripe for fruitful parallels, I think it might be over-emphasized because most discourse is derivative regurgitation. Most people are not generating original insights from their own experiences, but regurgitating (at best mildly extending) Christopher Alexander (or other derived work). Christopher Alexander tied to mine architecture for systems metaphors (because that was his background), and a group of software folks back in the day tried to map that to software development -- in other words, a lot of it was purely incidental. And they were all barely scratching the surface; there are likely many other fields with many other interesting analogies. Fresh perspectives that try to mine new lessons (from different domains) would be really interesting.
PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
"A Pattern Language" was published in 1977. It has only been in existence for slightly less than 50 years. When it was published it was simultaneously a revolutionary and also completely niche book. It did not build on any kind of existing sub-discipline of architecture, and most architects ignored it entirely (an awful lot of them still do). It took several decades for anyone to notice that there might perhaps be some interesting way to take what Alexander had done in the context of architecture and urban planning and apply it to software development. That did not happen "over 50 years" ago. The reason why "the discipline always seems to be architecture" is because there are no other disciplines that are (a) synthetic (in the sense of being about creating something that did not exist before, rather than analytic) and (b) have an existing magnum opus that describes the patterns that humans have used for centuries to practice that discipline. The sciences are not a useful parallel, precisely because they are analytical. Various artistic practices could be useful analogies because of their synthetic nature, but the practice of art is widely held to be a matter of personal self-expression, and hardly a place you'd go looking to find "best practices".
- jackblemming 4y ago
  Thank you for correcting me. I was 10 to 20 years off. By all means, feel free to keep talking about design patterns for another 10 to 20 years then ;)

mxkopy 4y ago

Such a strange gripe to have. Architecture as a default comparison makes sense on many levels. You don't make blueprints for pottery. The level of 'coincidental' design is much lower in architecture than it is in painting. There are much more specified 'primitives' that you can use in architecture that directly reflect the capabilities of the construction, etc. And even before programming architecture was used metaphorically. 'Architecting a plan' and all that. It's not too difficult to understand how design in architecture differs from design in other areas, in a way that makes using it as a metaphor useful.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
> And even before programming architecture was used metaphorically. 'Architecting a plan' and all that. The verbing of "architect" is relatively recent, and certainly comes after programming. Historically, and outside the USA, one generally designs a plan, you do not architect it. Architects design buildings, they do not architect them. Some kinds of software involve designing an architecture.
- mxkopy 4y ago
  Not only are you nitpicking, you are also wrong. https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/07/architectural-criticism.html https://www.grammarphobia.com/blog/2013/07/architectural-cri... We should add that the use of “architect” as a verb isn’t a recent phenomenon. The Oxford English Dictionary has written examples going back to the early 1800s. The earliest example in the OED is from a July 23, 1818, letter that the poet John Keats wrote to his brother Thomas after visiting Fingal’s Cave on the island of Staffa in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Here’s how a poem in the letter describes the cave and its distinctive basalt columns: “This was architected thus / By the great Oceanus.” Your view of language is incredibly prescriptive. If I want to, I can say architects architect buildings. There's nothing wrong with that. If there's a useful distinction between designing and architecting then there's 0 reason I shouldn't bring attention to it. For example. If 'to architect' is synonymous with 'design', would you say someone architects a logo?
  - PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago
    You are welcome to say whatever you like, with whatever words you like. Yes, this may have been common practice in the early 1800s, and earlier. It ceased to be common practice in the Anglophone world for most of the 20th century, and only re-emerged in the software development community in the final decade of that century. The fact that a particular language habit existed at some point in time is often worth making to people who don't realize that language changes and shifts. But if you're going to do that, I think it wise to also acknowledge that the changes and shifts also involve particular language habits falling out of general use.
    - mxkopy 4y ago
      At the end of the day language is a carrier for meaning, that's all it is. Its history doesn't matter unless it confers meaning in some way (which it often does). In my opinion saying 'architecting' is meaningfully different from 'designing'. If people don't generally do that, then their loss is the shade of meaning that that difference implies

ssivark 4y ago

> I don’t recall saying that at all. My gripe is that different discipline always seems to be architecture and the design patterns topic has been talked to death for over 50 years now. I concur with the spirit of this gripe. While architecture certainly might be ripe for fruitful parallels, I think it might be over-emphasized because most discourse is derivative regurgitation. Most people are not generating original insights from their own experiences, but regurgitating (at best mildly extending) Christopher Alexander (or other derived work). Christopher Alexander tied to mine architecture for systems metaphors (because that was his background), and a group of software folks back in the day tried to map that to software development -- in other words, a lot of it was purely incidental. And they were all barely scratching the surface; there are likely many other fields with many other interesting analogies. Fresh perspectives that try to mine new lessons (from different domains) would be really interesting.

PaulDavisThe1st 4y ago

"A Pattern Language" was published in 1977. It has only been in existence for slightly less than 50 years. When it was published it was simultaneously a revolutionary and also completely niche book. It did not build on any kind of existing sub-discipline of architecture, and most architects ignored it entirely (an awful lot of them still do). It took several decades for anyone to notice that there might perhaps be some interesting way to take what Alexander had done in the context of architecture and urban planning and apply it to software development. That did not happen "over 50 years" ago. The reason why "the discipline always seems to be architecture" is because there are no other disciplines that are (a) synthetic (in the sense of being about creating something that did not exist before, rather than analytic) and (b) have an existing magnum opus that describes the patterns that humans have used for centuries to practice that discipline. The sciences are not a useful parallel, precisely because they are analytical. Various artistic practices could be useful analogies because of their synthetic nature, but the practice of art is widely held to be a matter of personal self-expression, and hardly a place you'd go looking to find "best practices".

jackblemming 4y ago
Thank you for correcting me. I was 10 to 20 years off. By all means, feel free to keep talking about design patterns for another 10 to 20 years then ;)