That’s great, but misses the point. Christopher Alexander’s big ideas involve the people who lives, works, and plays within the architecture. The pattern language was designed for them, so they can participate in the design process of their own living spaces.

The equivalent would be a pattern language that app users themselves can use for their apps. Instead of having the app developers drive design with A/B testing to gain user traction (with a societal risk of dark patterns), the users themselves put things together that would work with how they are doing things.

The implementation of the code would work from there. Something the end-users can change the code themselves.

Smalltalk was designed to allow that level of user participation ... but the legacy we ended up with is OOP and gang of four.

If anything, something like TCL/TK is closer to that vision than what we currently have. (What we currently have: mass lockin of consumers and end-users by a different Gang of Four — Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Google).

Alexander’s keynote to the ‘96 OOPSLA conference goes into detail about his ideas and how it can be applicable to software engineering. He was imploring software engineers not to make the same mistake that architects did with his pattern language ideas ... but we still made the same mistake anyways.