Great comment, basically a restatement of Christopher Alexander's philosophy of architecture, as applied to software. This to me is where top-down thinking like

Great comment, basically a restatement of Christopher Alexander's philosophy of architecture, as applied to software. This to me is where top-down thinking like Design Patterns sometimes go wrong; The GOF and related literature never really emphasized or adopted at a fundamental level, Alexander's most essential insight: the discovery of patterns should be driven from the bottom up, from the essential goal of expressing how human beings live in buildings (software). I like and use patterns, but rarely according to 'textbook' implementations, and I always felt that the patterns literature never went deep enough into Alexander's fundamental principles, which I think you've paraphrased so well here. Less friction among humans is the entire point of software engineering. Should be on a banner over every CS department and software publishing house in the world.