[HN Gopher] Christopher Alexander has died
___________________________________________________________________
Christopher Alexander has died
Author : voisin
Score : 414 points
Date : 2022-03-18 20:24 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnu.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnu.org)
| UberFly wrote:
| The design and structure in that campus building picture is
| beautiful. Wow.
| leobg wrote:
| What a sad day. Never met him personally. But from what I heard
| this man's influence has reached from architecture all the way to
| Wikipedia and Tesla. Unthinkable how different our world today
| would be if it hadn't been for his work. May he rest in peace.
| And may his ideas continue to live, and mingle, and add color to
| our world.
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| He was where the concept of Design Patterns came from.
|
| In the early days of Design Patterns (GoF, _et al_ ), he was
| often quoted.
|
| I purchased a couple of his books: _A Pattern Language_ [0],
| and _The Timeless Way of Building_ [1]. These books were very
| readable.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Pattern_Language
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Timeless_Way_of_Building
| fsloth wrote:
| IMO Alexander's design pattern concept is intelligently
| superior to the terms trivialization in the atrociously
| highly rated GoF book. GoF enumerates the tedious patches one
| needs to use on cumbersome languages like Java or C++ due to
| the languages primitive nature. The main advantage of GoF
| that now when you say "Factory pattern" everyone knows sort
| of concept they are speaking of.
|
| However.
|
| In the scope of Alexander's work GoF patterns are of equal
| complexity, as if giving names to typical architectural items
| like "door" or "room".
|
| Alexander's work is on a higher level - discussing how to
| perceive the complex totality the combination and co-
| existence of such design features create. GoF book names door
| a door. Alexander's book discusses how to design houses and
| communities. Completely different scale.
|
| In software engineering terms I think the closest book that
| is the best analogue to The Timeless Way of Building in terms
| of discussing higher level patterns, and how to combine them,
| is perhaps the classical Structure and Interpretation of
| Computer programs that since it uses such an elegant
| language, it can skip the tedium and start with expressing of
| higher level patterns, and in the end how to combine them
| into a whole complex system.
| getpost wrote:
| Before APL, There was _Notes on the Synthesis of Form_ in
| 1964.
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notes_on_the_Synthesis_of_Form
| discreteevent wrote:
| From the introduction:
|
| > Indeed, since the book was published, a whole academic
| field has grown up around the idea of "design methods"-and
| I have been hailed as one of the leading exponents of these
| so-called design methods. I am very sorry that this has
| happened, and want to state, publicly, that I reject the
| whole idea of design methods as a subject of study, since I
| think it is absurd to separate the study of designing from
| the practice of design. In fact, people who study design
| methods without also practicing design are almost always
| frustrated designers who have no sap in them, who have
| lost, or never had, the urge to shape things. Such a person
| will never be able to say anything sensible about "how" to
| shape things either. Poincare once said: "Sociologists
| discuss sociological methods; physi- cists discuss
| physics." I love this statement. Study of method by itself
| is always barren.
| fsloth wrote:
| That book is fantastic! It's absolutely thrilling design
| joyride through the most surprising of concepts - and yet
| it manages to send a very concrete message to designers of
| all disciplines who are required to build something novel
| that needs to meet real world requirements.
|
| Minsky, vernacular architecture, graphs, old houses, how to
| design complex systems...
| hcarvalhoalves wrote:
| Most people know "A Pattern Language" because of the design
| patterns, but it's _this_ book that every software engineer
| (and everyone in the space of designing solutions) should
| read.
| flancian wrote:
| I agree it's a great place to start; it is much shorter,
| and contains stronger (or more obvious anyway) links with
| mathematics, graph theory.
|
| We did a Christopher Alexander reading club some months
| ago and took some notes as a group using hypothes.is, it
| worked very nicely and anyone interested is welcome to
| join in:
|
| https://anagora.org/go/notes-on-the-synthesis-of-
| form/hypoth...
| rwmj wrote:
| He turns up in Stewart Brand's excellent TV programme _How
| Buildings Learn_ , which is also on Youtube:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/brandst
| jabl wrote:
| Truly an excellent and thought provoking series.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Original music by Brian Eno! I'm not sure which episode
| Alexander shows up in, but it isn't 5. Still, highly
| recommended.
| carapace wrote:
| It was Brand & company's "Whole Earth Catalog" where I first
| read about Christopher Alexander, as well as Bucky Fuller and
| Bill Mollison.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whole_Earth_Catalog
| https://archive.org/details/wholeearth
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Mollison
| https://billmollison.org/
|
| - - - -
|
| Christopher Alexander developed a site called "Building Living
| Neighborhoods" about just that:
| https://www.livingneighborhoods.org/ht-0/bln-exp.htm
| yesenadam wrote:
| Thanks!
|
| That channel seems to have episodes 2 to 6, but not 1.
|
| Episode 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=maTkAcDbrEY
| threefour wrote:
| The most influential person in architecture and software whose
| influence is difficult to point to.
| drewda wrote:
| Looks like the CNU web server is overwhelmed. I was able to read
| this at
| https://web.archive.org/web/20220318203326/https://www.cnu.o...
| wnesensohn wrote:
| I'm glad I stumbled upon his books when researching design
| patterns early on in my career. His writing in 'The Timeless Way
| of Building' left a big impression on me, precisely because it
| didn't reduce building to a sequence of mechanical steps which
| are to be followed exactly, but allowed, even called for, gaining
| a deeper understanding for quality. It's hard to express, but he
| did a stellar job at it.
|
| It's somewhat ironic that he is said to have laid the foundations
| of the design patterns movement which, I don't know when, must
| have taken a series of wrong turns to end up where it did.
|
| Thank you Mr. Alexander for writing about these fuzzy things
| which dare to be named.
| toyg wrote:
| _> the design patterns movement which, I don 't know when, must
| have taken a series of wrong turns_
|
| Such is always the case, as soon as anything becomes a "school
| of thought". From Christianity to patterns and agile, someone
| will evangelise a set of concepts that s/he strongly believes
| in, and they will be reinterpreted or exploited by others for
| their own purposes. For design patterns, it was the whole
| "Enterprise Java" sector who went overboard and became
| doctrinaire.
| cryptonector wrote:
| > In 1965, Alexander wrote a much-cited essay, A City Is Not a
| Tree, one of the earliest and most trenchant critiques of the
| dendritic, sprawl pattern of city planning and development.
|
| On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris,
| Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic". There's nothing wrong
| with that, and it has everything to do with the history of the
| ownership of all the bits of property on the city.
|
| Sprawl is a problem, but sprawl is a new world problem that has
| to do with its _very_ short history.
|
| We've got about 500 years of old world folk moving to the new
| world, but the old world has thousands of years of history.
| Besides new world cities starting from much lower population
| density overall than the old world already had four to five
| centuries ago, there's also the fact that the last 100+ years of
| that history has had personal motor vehicles in it -- that's
| 1/4th to 1/5th of all the Americas' post-Columbus era, while it's
| more like less than 1/20th of the old world's history.
|
| You can critique things like this all you like, but trying to do
| away with the "dendritism" that arises naturally is... unnatural,
| and requires a great deal of market distortion or use of force.
| Is that really something we want?
|
| EDIT: Yeah, I probably read too much into that sentence!
| nabla9 wrote:
| The sentence you quote does not give you enough information to
| make any kind of critique. It's OK to use the sentence as a
| writing prompt to write what toughs it brings into your mind,
| but that has little to do with the subject. Alexander's
| critique is against rigid tree structure when a city should
| have connections between branches.
| cryptonector wrote:
| That's fair.
| PaulDavisThe1st wrote:
| > We've got about 500 years of old world folk moving to the new
| world, but the old world has thousands of years of history.
| Besides new world cities starting from much lower population
| density overall than the old world already had four to five
| centuries ago
|
| Humans have lived in "the new world" for at least 24,000 years.
| At the period when the first Spanish arrived in "the new
| world", it seems likely that there were cities here at least as
| large as anything in "the old world". By some calculations,
| "the new world" may have been home for between 10% and 33% of
| total human population worldwide.
|
| What changed the development path in "the new world" was the
| arrival of "old worse" disease, which wiped out at least 80% of
| the human population here (perhaps 10% of humanity), and then a
| frankly genocidal process by European settlers built around
| ideas such as manifest destiny that intentionally completely
| ignored the millenia-old histories of human civilization here.
|
| It is convenient to reset the clock in 1492 (or even 1776), but
| it is not honest.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > On the other hand, all dense old-world cities (London, Paris,
| Rome, even Tokyo, say) are... "dendritic".
|
| Not in the sense of the Alexander essay. It explicitly
| contrasts the interwoven connections of traditional cities with
| the artificial tree-like structure of modern planned cities.
|
| "Tree", in the sense that Alexander uses it in that essay, is a
| math tree (e.g., a binary tree in CS), not an organic tree.
|
| I highly recommend reading the essay for those who haven't seen
| it.
| stellar678 wrote:
| Sprawl patterns are not caused by natural market forces.
|
| They are caused and enabled by land-use zoning that uses state
| force to limit the use of private property, along with massive
| market distortions like government-funded freeways and the
| building of low-density infrastructure without a sustainable
| mechanism to pay for maintenance and operation of that
| infrastructure.
|
| But I'm also not a free-market absolutist and I'm not sure I
| believe there has ever been an unencumbered free market.
| Markets are just a mechanism to organize and manage a complex
| system. There are always forces in place which nudge the
| overall behavior in one way or another while still leaving the
| market interactions to hash out the details. That's fine - we
| just need to nudge things is the "right" direction.
| bullfightonmars wrote:
| Don't forget that the market _was_ heavily distorted in favor
| of sprawl.
|
| Massive federal investments (subsidies) in:
|
| * interstates and highways that made sprawl development
| possible.
|
| * oil infrastructure and automobiles.
|
| * suburban housing development designed to specifically exclude
| people of color, driving disinvestment from and leading to the
| collapse of cities.
|
| None of these are natural new-world problems nor are they
| market driven, these are policy choices made. Pre vs Post WWII
| cities are structured and shaped completely differently as a
| result of these policies.
| riffic wrote:
| dense old-world cities were constrained by city walls and
| mobility.
| [deleted]
| onetime865 wrote:
| Probably the biggest influence of my engineering career. RIP.
| lambda_dn wrote:
| Sorry, but he had nothing to do with software development. He was
| co-opted by the object oriented crowd for the failings of OO
| which every LISP had from the get go.
| DyslexicAtheist wrote:
| I 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...
| exolymph wrote:
| Massive 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.
| oh_sigh wrote:
| Agreed - it is a great bathroom or subway book, because you can
| pop into it randomly for 4 minutes and read a section, and then
| go on with your day.
| Bud wrote:
| I treasure my copies of all of Alexander's books, but most
| especially A Pattern Language. It's beautifully printed and
| bound and it's a joy to come back to again and again. I'm not
| an architect or urban planner; it's just that the ideas are so
| compelling and beautiful.
| pjmorris wrote:
| Fascinating book, full of interesting ideas. I bought my copy
| in the 1980's. I had a roommate then who I reconnected with
| lately. He remembered the book and asked about it. I dropped in
| on him a couple weeks ago and left my copy on loan so he could
| spend some time with it.
| Bieberfan2003 wrote:
| Thankfully, this PDF is nowhere near complete. Check it out
| from your local library.
| habith wrote:
| Why thankfully? What if you cannot access your local library
| for a myriad of reasons?
| lalopalota wrote:
| Why a myriad of reasons? What if you can't access your
| library for one reason?
| recursive wrote:
| Then you still wouldn't be able to make it to your
| library.
| [deleted]
| caslon wrote:
| He's dead. There's no longer justification for "thankfully."
| gjvc wrote:
| https://b-ok.cc/book/1113376/a93424
| a9h74j wrote:
| I don't remember which volume it was from, but doing any
| general maintenance I always remember this suggestion of his:
|
| _Work on the most neglected area first_ -- e.g., work on the
| most neglected outdoor area of a property first.
|
| I don't recall his specific reasoning, but in my mind the
| essence was: _Otherwise you will be acting on displacement
| anxiety_ and _When an eyesore is taken care of first, your
| perspective on potential other improvements will change._
|
| RIP
| gjvc wrote:
| This is the most efficient way (IMHO) to raise the _average_
| quality of an installation / system, not to strive for a 1%
| improvement in the top end (while expending 10x the effort in
| doing so for said 1%, rather than the inverse).
|
| This is one of those rare delights; an approach which is as
| powerful as it is simple.
| chrisweekly wrote:
| Huge loss. His thoughts on the "habitability" of software are
| priceless.
| drallison wrote:
| Steve Hanna introduced me to Christopher Alexander's work. I was
| consulting at Intel, writing the Intel 4004/4040 native code
| assembler for the Intellec Microcomputer Development System.
| Steve and I shared a fascination in how systems and program get
| designed. Steve got me to read _Notes on the Synthesis of Form_
| and I was hooked. Somehow I 'd missed it when it appeared in the
| _Whole Earth Catalog_. It certainly influenced my thinking. Years
| later, I got to know Christopher Alexander, the creative mind,
| and was continually surprised at how similar architecture and
| computer systems design are to each other. Christopher came to
| Stanford and gave talks. He was inspiring and exciting.
| wonder_er wrote:
| I had no idea Christopher Alexander was a software development
| luminary. I knew him via _A Pattern Language_, and I'm way more
| into architecture and physical space design than I am software.
| Now I'm mega interested to absorb his thoughts on software. I
| expect I'll be much better for it.
|
| He's on my "recommended reading" list, I had _no_ idea he was so
| enmeshed in software: https://josh.works/recommended-
| reading#a-pattern-language-to...
| vanderZwan wrote:
| If I'm not mistaken his writing also inspired the first wiki
| amouat wrote:
| Have a look at Patterns of Software by Richard Gabriel
| https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf
|
| It's not so much that Alexander has thoughts on software but
| that others realised they could draw clear analogues.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I just buy a new copy of _A Pattern Language_ whenever I see it
| in a bookstore, because I know I 'm going to end up giving it to
| someone. It's one of those books you can confidently recommend to
| any curious, intelligent person, and it may change their
| thinking, or at least blow their mind, whether they find it
| useful or not. He was such an original thinker.
| [deleted]
| queuebert wrote:
| That book changed my life. We bought our house using those
| principles, and couldn't be happier or more comfortable.
| ssivark wrote:
| If you could write out the process, that would make for a
| great post! I'm really hoping you do :-)
| chubot wrote:
| I'd be interested in any details on that, i.e. what the house
| is like.
|
| One lightbulb that went off for me when reading his books was
| the pattern of "windows on 2 sides of a room".
|
| I realized the house I grew up in was a big mass-produced
| rectangle with windows on the front and back. And since no
| rooms spanned the house front to back, that means that no
| room in the ~3000 sq ft. house had windows on 2 sides. (This
| is close to "McMansion" architecture but not quite)
|
| Since then I've noticed people gravitate towards rooms with
| windows on 2 sides, and now I live in a apartment with many
| windows.
|
| For better or worse I've lived on both coasts and everything
| is "economically optimized" there. In SF and NYC it's very
| common to see long skinny apartments that were split down the
| middle at some point in the last ~50 years, lacking windows.
| And it's also common to see very boxy and optimized new
| buildings, i.e. lacking architecture. They're optimized for
| density and not living quality.
|
| I may be buying a house, but these requirements basically
| amount to extremely expensive, old houses of a limited stock.
| I'd be interested in any counterexamples to that!
| mbrock wrote:
| That pattern goes together with "Wings of Light" which is
| specifically about avoiding deep boxes in favor of e.g. T
| shapes and other narrower wings that can let light in.
| devchix wrote:
| There's a small distillation of his principles in _The Not So
| Big House_ , (bonus, it has photos). From what I remember, you
| want to design space so people move from dark toward light,
| light rooms from two sides, sleep area should be like covered
| nooks for feeling of security, stairs and halls should be
| wider, there should be views from one room to another ... _A
| Pattern Language_ and _The Not So Big House_ informed how we
| did renovations in our own home.
| lcuff wrote:
| I 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 that there are so few that
| are 'large scale'.
| argomo wrote:
| Yeah, IIRC, the very first pattern is a proposal to divide the
| world into 10,000 nations of 1 million people each (?!).
| lukasb wrote:
| Saw him speak at Berkeley around the time his book on the Eshin
| project was released. Talked in very strong terms about the
| importance of working in a holistic, caring way.
|
| A SWE in the audience spoke up, saying basically "look, we want
| to follow that approach, but it's hard, we have a lot of
| stakeholders to satisfy in order for a project to happen."
|
| Alexander was unyielding. "Once you've worked with love, you
| won't want to work in any other way."
|
| YMMW on the practicality of his advice, but it was super
| inspiring.
| blenderdt wrote:
| This is the reason I changed how I approached software
| projects. Alexander made me rethink how software should be
| built: with love for the user, but also with love for other
| developers.
| sloan wrote:
| Thanks for the anecdote, I love it. What's SWE in this context?
| vpribish wrote:
| Soft Ware Engineer. it's a crappy TLA.
| Nadya wrote:
| Software Engineer.
| fifticon wrote:
| Software Engineer I think
| actually_a_dog wrote:
| I wouldn't call it love _per se_ , but it certainly does take a
| special kind of empathy to put yourself in the shoes of someone
| using your software, and to use that perspective to make a
| great product.
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I have several junior developers on my team who came from the
| customer success / support side of the business who grew
| themselves into developer roles. They typically have not only
| the strongest desire to learn & improve, but also the most
| empathy and understanding of our impact on customers & their
| livelihood.
| kitd wrote:
| I believe every developer needs to spend regular time in a
| customer-facing support role (if possible). They will learn
| much more clearly how difficult (or less likely easy) their
| product is to use.
| wonder_er wrote:
| Several? That feels like _many_. I rarely cross paths with
| teams that can handle more than one at a time.
|
| Do you have a particularly large team? Or a particularly
| good process for 'onboarding' new/less-experienced
| engineers?
|
| Sounds like a lot of things are going right at your company
| for your team to have picked up several developers this
| way.
| kbelder wrote:
| Yes! If you can get somebody on your team that has worked
| their way up from, for example, a customer service contact
| center, they'll be immensely valuable. Just their insight
| on what customers love and hate about your product is
| probably worth their hire.
| wonder_er wrote:
| This was my path into software development! It's served
| me so well, now I want to figure out how to "recruit"
| future engineers from customer service teams.
|
| The benefits would be endless, and they'd "cut their
| teeth" on solving crunch problems for themselves/their
| teams.
| alexott wrote:
| Very often they go into product management roles
| agumonkey wrote:
| I think it's a long term obvious win. If you care larger, you
| avoid painting yourself in corners. See what really needs to
| be done, do just that and enjoy the harmony.
| amelius wrote:
| What if you work in the ad industry and doing what your real
| users want hurts your bottom line?
| boxed wrote:
| Don't.
|
| "Right livelihood" is a thing. It might not be easy but you
| should.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I worked in the ad industry for years and made good money
| doing it. I now work, unpaid, on a FOSS passion project.
|
| What I would advise is treating each job as a college
| course which you also happen to be paid for. For me, this
| meant not allowing myself to become emotionally invested in
| the work, taking good notes about what I learned each day,
| and looking for a new job (typically with a raise) once
| those notes were sparse for too long.
| shoo wrote:
| Alexander advocated getting the people who would live or work
| in the buildings involved in the design and construction of
| the buildings. Get the people who will live in the place out
| in the field and work together to peg out the outlines of the
| buildings & refine the design.
|
| This philosophy is succinctly summarised in the book
| Peopleware:
|
| > local control of design by those who will occupy the space
|
| Unfortunately this aspect of Alexander's philosophy of
| letting the users participate in the design, construction or
| customisation of building and towns was ignored, while the
| other idea of design patterns became very popular when
| adapted to software.
|
| Some software is built for a market where the buyers are the
| end-users to software. Other software is built for markets
| where the purchasing decision is made by a committee of
| stakeholders, perhaps excluding the people who will be the
| day to day users of the software. If you contrast the two in
| terms of usability, you can start to appreciate what
| Alexander was getting at.
| hosh wrote:
| It isn't as if the tech was not out there, but we made a
| conscious choice to move away from user-participation
| platforms -- Hypercard and Smalltalk among the examples.
|
| Minecraft has some of these elements, and is why it is fun
| for people.
|
| Arguably, Roblox is the largest scale example, though my
| understanding is that it is still not so easy that end
| users can really participate in creating their own designs.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| Without knowing Alexander's concept in detail, once I learned
| to work (and live) that way, doing otherwise has seemed like a
| waste of time, almost pointless. The only point is that,
| unfortunately, many people don't understand - and scoff at -
| working 'with love', but in those cases I often feel like I'm
| mostly building a road to nowhere.
| specialist wrote:
| I once had a high trust (love) team. We kicked ass. Together.
| I miss it every day. Everything since has tasted like ash.
| I've been trying to get back to that happy place ever since.
| Sadly, I eventually stopped talking about trust (in the
| workplace) IRL; people don't much like crazy talk or zealots.
| pjmorris wrote:
| I've been on a number of teams like that, and miss them.
| There's a phrase 'the song of friends at work' that I can't
| find the source of, but it serves as a kind of navigation
| point for me as I try to steer my career and efforts.
| jalfresi wrote:
| Very early in my software development career, i was frustrated
| and sad that i wasnt able to progress due to a lack of
| comprehension of how software is structured from smaller sub
| systems. I didnt have any kind of mentor available to me, and I
| seriously considered changing careers. I naively assumed that
| good software was written by naturally talented people, and
| because I was having problems growing I was obviously not
| talented and therefore would never get improve (I was young).
|
| Then i stumbled across "Notes on the synthesis of form" from some
| random internet recommendation.
|
| Not only was this book a complete eye opener, it helped me to
| understand so much about what I was doing was mostly by accident,
| and that design should be purposeful.
|
| The most important lesson for my fledgling mind though was that
| design was a process, and a process that improved with each
| application. That good software developers arnt "born", they are
| self sculpted.
|
| I still have that battered, note riddled, page corners folded
| copy of "notes" and I take with me on holiday every year to re-
| read. Its my most favourite book I've ever read. It fills me with
| such inspiration everytime I read it.
|
| I'm very sad to hear of Christophers passing. I never got to
| thank him.
| loganwedwards wrote:
| Notes on the Synthesis of Form provided intriguing insight into
| the theory and cultural impacts of design. As others have
| mentioned, he provided examples using architecture and biology.
| Quite fascinating albeit dry at times. Highly recommended. Thanks
| to the others for other reading suggestions.
| xLaszlo wrote:
| This video of him from 1996 is amazing with hindsight. A must
| watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA
|
| RIP Christopher Alexander
| pmoriarty wrote:
| This is very interesting, but his main concerns (the creation
| of what he calls "living structures", "nurturing structures",
| and things that make people "feel whole") seem to be completely
| and utterly divorced from what people in the computer field are
| interested in.
| jdougan wrote:
| Sounds a lot closer to developing in an image based system
| (Smalltalk/Lisp Machine/Classical block based Forth/EMACS
| etc.)
| smiley1437 wrote:
| Yes, I wonder what he felt about how some of the most well-
| compensated members of our society spend their efforts on
| building software that gets people to click on ads
| gjvc wrote:
| OOPSLA talks of that era were fantastic. Alan Kay has often
| paid tribute to Christopher Alexander in his talks and I cannot
| resist mentioning this from Alan from the following year
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oKg1hTOQXoY
| Pamar wrote:
| As many other here, I know about Christopher Alexander mostly
| from his influence on software theory and design.
|
| Here you can find 12 of his "real world" works: https://www.re-
| thinkingthefuture.com/design-studio-portfolio...
| lambda_dn wrote:
| mvkel wrote:
| 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.
| nabla9 wrote:
| I 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.
| qohen wrote:
| 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.
| mempko wrote:
| I 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.
| shoo wrote:
| > There is a central quality which is the root criterion of life
| and spirit in a man, a town, a building, or a wilderness. This
| quality is objective and precise, but it cannot be named. [...]
| It is not only simpler beauty of form and color. Man can make
| that without making nature. It is not only fitness to purpose.
| Man can make that too, without making nature. And it is not only
| the spiritual quality of beautiful music or of a quiet mosque,
| that comes from faith. Man can make that too, without making
| nature.
|
| > The quality which has no name includes these simpler sweeter
| qualities. But it is so ordinary as well, that it somehow reminds
| us of the passing of our life.
|
| > It is a slightly bitter quality.
|
| - Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building
| nemo1618 wrote:
| Sounds like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mono_no_aware
|
| > The awareness of impermanence, or transience of things, and
| both a transient gentle sadness (or wistfulness) at their
| passing as well as a longer, deeper gentle sadness about this
| state being the reality of life.
| akkartik wrote:
| "The more living patterns there are in a place -- a room, a
| building, or a town -- the more it comes to life as an
| entirety, the more it glows, the more it has that self-
| maintaining fire which is the quality without a name.
|
| "And when a building has this fire, then it becomes a part of
| nature. Like ocean waves, or blades of grass, its parts are
| governed by the endless play of repetition and variety created
| in the presence of the fact that all things pass. This is the
| quality itself."
| isotropy wrote:
| Black bar?
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| He 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 "wholeness." He
| identified 15 elements of wholeness in designs that might be
| measured, like the presence of coherent centers, strong
| boundaries, local symmetries or roughness/imperfection. He
| proposes that "the harmony that is sought in these computations
| is indeed what we otherwise call 'beauty'. But the result of
| harmony-seeking computations are not merely pretty or artistic.
| In most cases, they are also better functionally and
| technically."
|
| Alexander, Christopher "Harmony-Seeking Computations."
| _International Journal of Unconventional Computing_ 4 (2008).
| Pamar wrote:
| Is it this ?
|
| https://patterns.architexturez.net/doc/az-cf-173014
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Yes
| Bieberfan2003 wrote:
| 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.
| ssivark wrote:
| 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.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| "Harmony" was also the metric used for the first multi-layer
| neural network by Smolensky (1983). Then Hinton called it
| (free) "energy"--same metric with a sign reversal. Then, with
| Rummelhart, they compromised and called it "goodness of fit."
| Same as Harmony. So, neural nets still optimize for Harmony, by
| another name. I find that wonderful, somehow.
| Isomorpheus wrote:
| Fascinating. Saw a paper pop up on one of my Semantic Scholar
| feeds just the other day with the title "Symmetry and
| simplicity spontaneously emerge from the algorithmic nature of
| evolution". Here's the link
| https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.07.28.454038v2
| siegecraft wrote:
| I wasn't aware of this paper before now and am excited to read
| it.
|
| The 15 properties of life were, I believe, his attempt to find
| the universal rules underlying the design patterns he described
| in _A Pattern Language_. I 've long thought that most of those
| properties could be described algorithmically and was curious
| what sort of system they would converge to. I suppose nature is
| one easy answer, but it's not a very useful one.
|
| For those who are interested, there's a nice summary of the
| properties and analysis of how they relate to each other at
| http://web.sfc.keio.ac.jp/~iba/papers/PURPLSOC14_Properties....
| and a more architecturally-focused take at
| https://www.archdaily.com/626429/unified-architectural-
| theor....
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Awesome, thank you for sharing these great resources. How did
| you find them?
| mezod wrote:
| Wow :( Precisely yesterday I was reading some reviews on some of
| his books on architecture... does anyone care to recommend one?
| mercutio2 wrote:
| A Pattern Language is incredibly good.
|
| His core ideas have been riffed on so much since then that it
| won't read as an original idea anymore, but it's still a great
| read if you're interested in thinking about how communities and
| building and people work.
| sloan wrote:
| The Timeless Way of Building is great
| siegecraft wrote:
| I enjoyed the short (30 minute) documentary about him and two of
| his projects: _Places For The Soul_. It used to be free on amazon
| but sadly no longer is. https://www.amazon.com/Places-Soul-Tries-
| World-Transforming/...
| stavros wrote:
| This is fairly off topic, but he's 76 in that photo? He looks 50!
| rongenre wrote:
| I took a class in cognitive psych decades ago, and one of the
| highlights was going over 'A Pattern Language' and 'A Timeless
| way of Building'.
| motohagiography wrote:
| Every time I meet an architect or designer, I ask them about
| Alexander, and in the sample of about 12, only one (a world
| renowned architect) had heard of him. He's hugely influential in
| software, and was a big influence on me in the 90's and 00's,
| along with Tufte, Hofstadter, and Feynman.
|
| I think it was hacker culture that really bouyed his ideas and
| kept them in the popular consciousness, and in turn, his ideas
| became really foundational to hacker culture as well. His passing
| is if not the loss of a pillar, it is at least a buttress.
| dr_dshiv wrote:
| Alexander hated modern architecture, which he felt was all
| about ego and not about human needs. Probably why architects
| conveniently forgot him.
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