Christopher Alexander’s Patterns and Software Design

The more I read about Christopher Alexander’s idea of patterns and pattern languages, currently in his The Timeless Way of Building, the less I feel that software design patterns have anything to do with it. They have adopted the convenient format and uses it to document proven solutions and build a shared vocabulary for software professionals—which indeed is great and something the community needs, but I feel there’s more to learn for software people from Alexander’s writing.

Alexander has expressed concern that the software community might not “get” his idea. For instance, in his OOPSLA ‘96 keynote address he said:

So far, as a lay person […] it looks to me more as though mainly the pattern concept, for you, is an inspiring format that is a good way of exchanging fragmentary, atomic, ideas about programming. Indeed, as I understand it, that part is working very well. But these other two dimensions, (1) the moral capacity to produce living structure and (2) the generativity of the thing, its capability of producing coherent wholes—I haven’t seen very much evidence of those two things in software pattern theory. Are these your shortcomings? Or is it just because I don’t know how to read the literature?

(See also my two posts from reading the transcript.) A year or two before this, he expressed the same concern in the foreword to Richard P. Gabriel’s Patterns of Software (PDF; released under a Creative Commons license) There he asked whether “the analogy, metaphor, or extension, from architecture to programming [is] legitimate,” and if “the people who write these programs, using alexandrian pattern […] do better work.”

I’ll get back to this. Got to go.