I cite Christopher Alexander's work in "A Pattern Language" all the time when talking about community structures.
His influence in all sorts of industries was profound.
Christopher Alexander has died
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Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#62I think it's underappreciated how much Christopher Alexander influenced a generation of software engineers. Those building in the 1980s,1990s, and early 2000s were directly impacted by his work. I feel a lot of that culture has been lost over the last 15 years, which is a shame.
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#63Massive PDF of A Pattern Language: https://arl.human.cornell.edu/linked%20docs/Alexander_A_Patt... But I recommend owning and reading it in print. Great book to dip in and out of at whim.
Thankfully, this PDF is nowhere near complete. Check it out from your local library.
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#64I suggest that anyone interested in his work reads part I of "The Patterns of Software" by Richard Gabriel. https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf In my opinion, Gabriel has a better and deeper understanding of Christopher Alexander's pattern language and how it can be applied to software than the whole Software Pattern movement which created a very different interpretation of patterns.
Christopher Alexander actually wrote the Foreward to this book and it's interesting because on the one hand he describes how Gabriel seems to understand his work better than his architect colleagues. But, not being a practioner, he wonders how his ideas will translate into software. It's an interesting read. And the book is too.
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
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Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#66I have been citing "A city is not a tree"[1] whenever our product managers are getting too loud about how to make cities more livable by plugging IoT into all the things. The issues he calls out goes far beyond "SmartCities". It's everywhere in Tech.
[1] http://www.bp.ntu.edu.tw/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/06-Alexa...
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#67Re: Christopher Alexander has died
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Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#69He had really interesting computational ideas about harmony. From The Nature of Order (2002) “As architects, builders, and artists, we are called upon constantly—every moment of the working day—to make judgments about relative harmony. We are constantly trying to make decisions about what is better and what is worse…” Following this, he published a paper on “harmony-seeking computation” as an approach to optimize “wh…
Meh. The whole "wholeness" and "structure-preserving transformations" thing just sounded to me like he was describing a literal cell division algorithm. He even gave cell division as an example of structured behavior rules producing wholeness out of chaos.
And is cell division any less magical for that comparison? We still don’t understand it well enough to build with anything close to the robustness & scalability of biological systems.
Re: Christopher Alexander has died
#70I wonder how many software engineers, and how many of the GoF (Gang of Four) who wrote the software book that popularized patterns in the software world, actually read and thought about A Pattern Language. I'm sure some, but in my mind the subtitle "Towns, Buildings, Construction" examines patterns that are large in scope, medium in scope, and small in scope. One of my personal complaints about software patterns is t…
Yeah, IIRC, the very first pattern is a proposal to divide the world into 10,000 nations of 1 million people each (?!).