Subject: Re: Design patterns as a weapon
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no>
Date: 1999/11/28
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3152795804994262@naggum.no>

* Aaron Gross <aaron+usenet@bfr.co.il>
| A curse on the programmer who first picked up a Christopher Alexander
| book!  Great for buildings, horrible for software.

  an amusing epitaph!  I wish I had written this myself, as I quite I agree
  that Christopher Alexander's work is amazingly interesting for the field
  in which he thought it up, but I, too, fail to see how it applies to the
  way software is built.  this doesn't mean we don't need to figure out how
  we come by our abstractions, and maybe it progresses through stages that,
  if not viewed as stages, could be very close to architectural patterns.

  this is getting vague, but my impression here is that somebody has seen
  something and have grappled for a name and not found one.  then there's
  this quality without a name, but the only thing that really matches up
  with the software people's grappling for a name is the lack of a name.
  two things both lacking a name aren't commonly thought to be the same,
  but that's how I think the misapplication of patterns to software was
  born.  nonetheless, it's very interesting to have seen it expanded upon
  and we're the richer for having had some work in this area, but let's
  figure out why we didn't really win this time, either, and move on.

#:Erik