Can't wait to get these two books by Christopher Alexander. What started as a science for aesthetic design in architecture has been applied to software engineering.
The work "A Pattern Language" originated from an observation that many medieval cities are attractive and harmonious. The authors said that this occurs because they were built to local regulations that required specific features, but freed the architect to adapt them to particular situations.
Alexander's philosophy of incremental, organic, coherent design influenced also the extreme programming movement.
What's cool, personally, is that I have been struggling with these notions in so many different areas: home, art, work, garden... It's really interesting to see a work, by a mathematician, that hits this on all these fronts at once.
It's cool to see how his work in aesthetics was taken and applied to software. And to find that I have gone from the other direction. Software to home/garden.
It's all the same thing. And it's not hokie.
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