excerpt from the "Patterns" book that God uses

[yesthattom]

Pattern #4,323,984: The Creek

The Creek Pattern involves leaving a space for running water at the bottom vertex between two hills, mountains, or other high land formations. [...]

Quoted from Page 12,642,120, “Design Patterns in Reality”, by God, God Books Inc.

(This will only be understood to software developers that are fans of the “patterns” book series)

Comments

It's also funny...

[anselm23.livejournal.com]

It's also funny to those architecture fans of Christopher Alexander, who helped popularize the use of patterns in architecture, and whose book, A Pattern Language, helped inspire the use of patterns in software.

Incidentally, I've recently re-read Pattern Language, and posted a brief review of it in my LJ, if you're interested. I've just picked up, The Timeless Way of Building, which is the prequel, and while it's less interesting, it's still pretty powerful.

Re: It's also funny...

[xthread.livejournal.com]

It's also worth noting that Christopher Alexander is almost certainly the point source for software's use of the Pattern metaphor and the language and structures that go with it.

Re: It's also funny...

[anselm23.livejournal.com]

Does it work? I mean, in architecture C. Alexander has been a bit of a figure of fun. Architects poke at his ideas as if at a dead thing with a stick, and sniff in disdain. His belief that anybody can build using his patterns and produce beautiful buildings, does not seem to hold up. On the other hand, architects who practice with his patterns in mind have produced some potentially beautiful communities.

There was an effort for a brief, shining moment to use his patterns to rebuild parts of New Orleans and Mississippi using some of the principles of New Urbanism, and Alexander's patterns, after Hurricane Katrina. However, it got stuck in top-down engineering, and the folks on the ground (often literally on the ground) eventually took back control of the project and did (are doing?) it their own way with modular housing and other solutions -- assuming they have the money.

However, while I know about the infiltration of pattern ideas into software, I have no idea if it's regarded as successful or not. Is it successful? Has it been valuable to think in patterns for software designers? How does it work?

Re: It's also funny...

[n5red.livejournal.com]

For the last 30 years I've been watching developers avoid or try to discredit many software develpment techniques. And, you know what? In almost every case, the developers were wrong. I've seen and talked with a number of less than wonderful architects, so I wonder how much they suffer from the same sort of behaviour.

Re: It's also funny...

[xthread.livejournal.com]

On the point of physical world architecture, much of Eugene, Oregon, was bebuilt in the early seventies based very closely upon C. Alexander's work, and it seemed to work; I can't speak to the more recent efforts, though I feel that I can speak to the fact that an awful lot of the time when people who want to apply the principles of a deeply complex discipline (such as architecture, or software design) without having much experience in the discipline often blow it, so having that happen in architecture should not be surprising.

I can't actually speak to how well it has or hasn't worked in computing. Certainly the extreme programming people were doing some very impressive things for a while, I presume that the software patterns people have been as well - but at the same time, everyone else in the game has also been trying to use that particular hammer on that problem set, so while they may have been solving problems that other strategies couldn't solve, it's unlikely that it looked like a revolution, because after all, everyone was doing it.