The Waves
Tracing the lives of a group of friends, this novel follows their development from childhood to middle age. Social events, individual achievements and disappointments form the outer structure of the book, but the focus is the inner life of the characters which is conveyed in rich poetic language.
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What Hacker News says
- > Above all, these figures present a model for thinking differently, and not in the glib sense touted by Steve Jobs. As the homogenization of culture proceeds apace, as the technology of surveillance hovers at the borders of our brains, such spaces are becoming rarer and more confined. I am haunted by a sentence from Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.”
- >>This is the case for most novels: you have to read seven hundred pages to get the handful of insights that were the reason the book was written, and the apparatus of the novel is there as a huge, elaborate, overbuilt stage set.
This is a pet peeve of mine in any type of art, especially installation art or sculpture where a clear and simple point can be quite literally expanded into a elaborate and overbuilt set that doesn't add to the impact. Or worse, obfuscates the original idea.
But then there's an explorative type of art where the method and the process is much more meaningful than the insight or punchline that the novel may have been built around. The Waves by Virginia Woolf, for example.
(edited to use my words more good)
- I believe Christopher Alexander's architectural approach could also be considered a failure in terms of mainstream adoption and impact on urban architecture.
The vision of a "timeless way of building" based on participatory design and traditional yet evolving harmonious patterns at every level of scale is beautiful but kind of steamrolled by technical capitalism, division of labor, economies of scale, CAD, etc.
It's still something to admire and advocate, I think.
I feel the same way about computers. In fact computers could be considered an aspect of the general Alexandrian project of harmonious life. They exist in our pockets and homes just like wallets and kitchen sinks. And computing environments are themselves architectural.
Patterns of user interfaces, of social network design, of data representation, generally patterns of how the digital world is constructed—this seems like a more authentically Alexandrian field than patterns of low-level software engineering.
Alexander writes about lived environments, worlds for humans to inhabit, social processes of inhabitation, and how to make sure our worlds are humane, human-scaled, and beautiful. He's not a theorist of technical construction.
That's why he asks, in the foreword he was asked to write for Richard P. Gabriel's Patterns of Software, about programs written using "design patterns":
> Do people actually feel more alive when using them? Is what is accomplished by these programs, and by the people who run these programs and by the people who are affected by them, better, more elevated, more insightful, better by ordinary spiritual standards?
Describing the change of perspective that comes from his way of thinking:
> Two things emanate from this changed standard. First, the work becomes more fun. It is deeper, it never gets tiresome or boring, because one can never really attain this standard. One’s work becomes a lifelong work, and one keeps trying and trying. So it becomes very fulfilling, to live in the light of a goal like this.
> But secondly, it does change what people are trying to do. It takes away from them the everyday, lower-level aspiration that is purely technical in nature, (and which we have come to accept) and replaces it with something deep, which will make a real difference to all of us that inhabit the earth.
Yet:
> But at once I run into a problem. For a programmer, what is a comparable goal? What is the Chartres of programming? What task is at a high enough level to inspire people writing programs, to reach for the stars? Can you write a computer program on the same level as Fermat's last theorem? Can you write a program which has the enabling power of Dr. Johnson’s dictionary? Can you write a program which has the productive power of Watt’s steam engine? Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot’s poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf’s The Waves?
Just contrast this with the movement that thinks abstract factory is an example of a design pattern.
I believe you could summarize Christopher Alexander's philosophy as opposition to abstract factories.
- I once attempted to let the influence of Virginia Woolf guide the way I programmed. After reading The Waves, I therefore decided to create a low-level dialect of Brainfuck with an emphasis on concurrency, a creation which I would use to manage my company's clients.
Eventually I came to the realization that you should make a considerate mental separation between the Waves and the way you program. Literature is full of anti-patterns.
- If you haven't already, you should watch this lecture by Nick Mount on Eliot's "The Waste Land": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PxF9xkB5o04
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
I recently reread Christopher Alexander's foreword to "Patterns of Software" and remembered his mention of this poem. He asks, with something that could be called optimism:
"Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?"
- Christopher Alexander, the architect who introduced the theory of "pattern languages," wrote the introduction to Richard P. Gabriel's "Patterns of Software." He says:
"In my life as an architect, I find that the single thing which inhibits young professionals, new students most severely, is their acceptance of standards that are too low. If I ask a student whether her design is as good as Chartres, she often smiles tolerantly at me as if to say, 'Of course not, that isn't what I am trying to do. I could never do that.'"
Then: "That standard must be our standard. If you are going to be a builder, no other standard is worthwhile."
And so he asks the same thing about programming.
"But at once I run into a problem. For a programmer, what is a comparable goal? What is the Chartres of programming? What task is at a high enough level to inspire people writing programs, to reach for the stars? Can you write a computer program on the same level as Fermat's last theorem? Can you write a program which has the enabling power of Dr. Johnson's dictionary? Can you write a program which has the productive power of Watt's steam engine? Can you write a program which overcomes the gulf between the technical culture of our civilization, and which inserts itself into our human life as deeply as Eliot's poems of the wasteland or Virginia Woolf's The Waves?"
Maybe code is just bad literature?
