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