The nature of order
"Here is acclaimed architect Christopher Alexander's four-volume masterwork; the result of 27 years of research and a lifetime of profoundly original thinking. Consider three vital perspectives on our world: a scientific perspective; a perspective based on beauty and grace; a commonsense perspective based on our intuitions about everyday life. Neither scientists, nor mystics, nor architects, nor politicians have so far found a single view of the world in which the three are united. This groundbreaking work allows us to form on picture of the world in which all three perspectives are interlaces. It opens the door to 21st-century science and cosmology."--From dust jacket.
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- Christopher Alexander, as mention elsewhere on this page, is also a great reference here. I'm working through his Nature of Order books at the moment, and although he can be long-winded and vague at times, I'm absolutely loving them.
Your comment made me think of a quote from the first book: "The view of order which I describe in this book is very different. It is even-handed with regard to ornament and function. Order is profoundly functional and profoundly ornamental."
- This post is sort of ignorant. Bro needs to learn NetMF style ultrarapid eigendecomposition)matrix factorization algorithms, read The Nature of Order, and touch grass.
- Isn't OOP supposed to be about bringing everyday human things as the paradigm for thinking? Stuff like doors, buttons, locks and keys, levers.
There are some good gems in the popular developer culture. "Circuit Breaker" is a de-facto name for an OOP pattern I enjoy. "Dependency Injection" not so much, could be called "Spare Parts Design".
Architectonic styles comes from Christopher Alexander stuff. It's a classic, patterns and GoF comes from that. We could use some of his later _Nature of Order_ stuff as well (the "Order" name I don't like that much though, but it's good content nonetheless).
I think this is the most cognitive (in what it does, not in what it says) we can get without being too geeky for beginners.
Minds to be "educated", maybe? Like we humans do. Small everyday stuff first, then more complicated human things later.
Anyway, about the "modular monolith": what about we just call it a "machine"? We already expect most machines to be modular, and the sum of its parts to do more than its individual components, and the idea that the components are designed and maintaned together.
- To me, Christopher Alexander's work comes closest to describing "systems science". I recommend Notes on the Synthesis of Form, The Timeless Way of Building, and then skipping to the Nature of Order series.
I'm of the opinion right now that what we call "design" and "architecture" is really just the science of finding stable habitable zones in high-dimensional problem spaces.
What's cool about Alexander's work is that he makes a great case that this stuff is objective phenomena that can be studied!
I'm planning to write much more about Christopher Alexander on my own blog in the future, but meanwhile I can recommend Dorian Taylor's excellent works:
• https://the.natureof.software
I gave a talk on this subject at DDD Europe this year, so keep your eyes out for "Timeless Way of Software - Taylor Troesh" on their YouTube channel :)
- These properties are explained in great detail in volume 1 of Christopher Alexander's The Nature of Order.
Reading about these with accompanying images of spaces or objects demonstrating the presence or absence of these properties is what made it stick for me.
- To quote Dorian Taylor[no affiliation, albeit we do follow each other on Twitter & BlueSky] from https://twitter.com/doriantaylor/status/1585008553554677762:
"Chances are if you're in software or digital design, you've heard of the book A Pattern Language, well, you may not be aware that Christopher Alexander effectively renounced patterns in 1996 (https://youtu.be/98LdFA-_zfA). He said he had something better…
The problem is, that better something happens to be four books and 2500 pages, and weigh 12 pounds. And, it's about buildings, not software. So my service to you is interpreting the text for software, and cutting the reading down by an order of magnitude."
That "something better" being Christopher Alexander's Opus Magnum, "The Nature of Order". Dorian's working on this under the name "The Nature of Software" here:
https://the.natureof.software/
And here:
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