Beautiful Software: Christopher Alexander's research initiative on computing
beautiful.software
beautiful.software
Glad to see he didn't leave off with that! We could do with more software people studying his actual work, which was building humane, living spaces that make people whole.
/r/evilbuildings for your amusement.
His wife and some of his proteges teach a program called Building Beauty that forwards his thinking in architecture and I know that they use The Nature of Order. I haven't read it yet but I suspect there's good reason they use that one as the basis of their program.
The great part is not the details of the actual patterns, sometimes they just seem plain wrong (e.g. guidelines for roof massing is what mcmansioms are doing today). The power of the book really is the edifice they create, the making real and making concrete of the harmony between large and small scale, something which is generally only felt. Crazy ambitious.
The moral dimension is not made explicit, and in hindsight, it seems to be injected really subversively. An example: the key indicator of a healthy public realm is one where people feel comfortable taking a nap. It seems somewhat quaint, but then look around outside. Are the people sleeping deviants, or are they kindly old folk taking a quick little doze after feeding the ducks at the pond? Other examples about independent mobility for children etc..
It's frightening how we debased our commons, made it intolerable, and inflict it on our poorest and most vulnerable.
Pattern language reveals this not by rhetoric, but rather a slow stacking of example after example. It's easy to miss if you consult the book as a reference manual, rather than read it as a polemic.
If you want to go deep his magnus opus is "Nature of Order". It's transcendent.
> Volume 1, The Timeless Way of Building, and Volume 2, A Pattern Language, are two halves of a single work. This book provides a language, for building and planning; the other book provides the theory and instructions for the use of the language. This book describes the detailed patterns for towns and neighborhoods, houses, gardens, and rooms. The other book explains the discipline which makes it possible to use these patterns to create a building or a town. This book is the sourcebook of the timeless way; the other is its practice and its origin.
> The two books have evolved very much in parallel. They have been growing over the last eight years, as we have worked on the one hand to understand the nature of the building process, and on the other hand to construct an actual, possible pattern language. We have been forced by practical considerations, to publish these two books under separate covers; but in fact, they form an indivisible whole. It is possible to read them separately. But to gain the insight which we have tried to communicate in them, it is essential that you read them both.
The former book expounds the ideas. But it is a weird pile of ideas. Somewhat moral and ethical, also somewhat practical, and also rather mystical. The combination has a religious feel.
The Oregon Experiment is a sort of prequel to The Timeless Way of Building and A Pattern Language. It's an account of the development and application of those ideas to building projects at the University of Oregon. It might be the most approachable explanation of the ideas. It has the considerable advantage of being a ninth the length of the other two combined.
I also recommend looking at works by Salingaros and Mehaffy like Design for a Living Planet, Principles of Urban Structure, and Unified Architecture Theory.
CA's architectural approach, stripped of the new age verbiage, is reducible to bottom-up, local action, global effect. There are local conditions with recipes, and patterns of binding/connecting. Together with Frank Lloyd Wright, these two gents have mapped out two distinct approaches to what Wright called Organic Architecture. (Wright following Sullivan used a 'generative system', the famous seed-germ [1], to order and create space.) Both men are pretty big on Beauty, but only one actually delivered beautiful works. Alexander's approach remains a theoretical proposition, unlike Frank Lloyd Wright's generative order approach (which he regrettably did not fully disclose to his proteges.)
And having skimmed the post and the core program course, it is clear these folk don't actually understand software, or anything that is worthy of the name 'Beauty' in software.
"It is a view of programming as the natural genetic infrastructure of a living world which you/we are capable of creating, managing, making available, and which could then have the result that a living structure in our towns, houses, work places, cities, becomes an attainable thing.
That would be remarkable. It would turn the world around, and make living structure the norm once again, throughout society, and make the world worth living in again." -- Christopher Alexander
I'm quite happy to have someone like Alan Kay pontificate on aesthetics of software, but Christopher Alexander is not remotely qualified.
[1]: https://www.archpaper.com/2010/11/remembering-louis-sullivan...
So far as I'm aware he never claimed any particular expertise or experience in software in any of the original books.
The equivalent would be architects taking the design principles of Multics and using them to lay out buildings.
That would be a bizarre thing to do. And it's no less bizarre in the other direction.
What seems to have happened in practice is that the GoF used CA's work to give their own ideas about patterns in OO software development more credibility than it would have had otherwise.
It's not that the idea of OO patterns is inherently bad. But pretending that it's somehow genuinely based on some speculations about built architecture is neither convincing nor credible.
Having said that - the CA quote above makes perfect sense, and it is about beautiful software from the end user's POV.
Which is a view that's often missing from CS and developer culture in general. Typically there's more effort put into forcing humans to act in bureaucratic, corporate, and computer-constrained ways, than in forcing computers to behave in ways that are inclusive, accessible, ecologically stable and robust, and organically open-ended.
The quote does not make any coherent sense, it's a sentiment decorated with buzzwords. As I said, if Alan Kay wants to hand wave CS utopia, heck, the man has certainly earned it, and his woowoo talk is actually intellectually far more densely packed and nutritious.
Btw, I said nothing about patterns, OO, good, or bad. We also disagree about portability of concepts and viewpoints across disciplines. I studied architecture in grad school and engineering before that. And learning C/S via vocational route I found my EE and architecture background was beneficial and definitely informed my architectural thinking in software. I merely said you can not have a one-to-one mapping. Here an example: modular thinking -> engineering, architecture, software. But "Pattern Language" on its own is not fully informative of conceptual concerns of software architecture. That was the point.
It's funny, I just ordered copies of The Timeless Way of Building, A Pattern Language and Notes on the Synthesis of Form earlier this year, intending to start a deep dive into Alexander's work. This is something I've been wanting to do for some time, and kinda regret that it's taken me this long to even get as far as ordering the books. Now to find time to dig into them...
sigh So much to learn, so little time. :-(
> ...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.
You don't have to learn everything by yourself, just leave some of the knowledge to others and focus on knowledge coordination ...
... checks profile
Never mind!
Though, have to tried to open up your tools for ActivityPub and offer your software as an interface to the Fediverse?
That's always been the intention, yes. Still a lot of work to do there. We don't have any ActivityPub support yet, but there is a lot of use of RSS/Atom and some limited support for ActivityStea.ms. ActivityPub is on the list, but I've had too many other things to focus on lately to put much energy into that. :-(
And you don't need to read it front to back, jumping to a random point is fine too.
The nicest looking places are smaller in scope with buildings around 4-5 stories, densely packed together which also makes them walkable.
Look at places like hillsboro oregon right by orenco station or delft south holland, these places are what I understand to be closer to human scale.
I didn't get that in watching him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=98LdFA-_zfA
I was picturing someone like Dan Akroyd on SNL as Leonard Pinth Garnell and "Bad Ballet."
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1703957/
Thomas Wolfe brought Maxwell Perkins a "book" of over 2,000 pages, and he was still writing furiously. Perkins still said "we mean to publish this" and brought it down to a manageable length.
Alexander just needs some tough love.
Now, see, for programmers of a certain age...
I bought the books, too. And no, I never finished reading them. So I am definitely in the club. ;-)
Classic rpg.