Peter Petrash
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 10 months, 2016–2026
1:03:36 · 135K views · Sep 9, 2013
Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.
HN cites it as the primary source for the claim that Alexander deprecated patterns, and as a prescient talk for programmers.
13 comments from Hacker News
Just finished watching a great 1996 lecture by Christopher Alexander: this video I recommend it for those who have read his work, but never seen or heard the man in action.
For anyone interested, Christopher Alexander was a huge influence on Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck. You can draw a fairly straight line from Alexander's ideas to new stuff like wiki, Extreme Programming, design patterns, refactoring, etc. For a very prescient talk by Alexander in 1996 to a bunch of ACM folks, see this video: this video
this talk that christopher alexander did a number of years ago is quite interesting this video one of the interesting things is that he had really moved on from "patterns" and was looking for something more intrinisic or "atomic" about design. Which actually is a much better guide to designing software.
worth checking this out from 1996 this video kind of ironic he was moving away from patterns to more fundamental concepts just as the software world was just discovering patterns. I think his shift to these more fundamental concepts is a much better way to think about design.
...and if you're brave enough, think about how Christopher Alexander's philosophy of "unfolding wholeness" applies so much more to an AST than to the stack-machines of the 1960's: this video