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In October 1996, the architect Christopher Alexander addressed “a whole football field” full of software developers. He told them that patterns—which he and his colleagues had invented, and with which so many software people had become enamored—were fundamentally inadequate for creating the kind of structure he wanted to see in the world. He told the audience he had a replacement in the works, and then he asked the software community to help him.
The replacement, which took another eight years to finish, was a four-volume, twelve-pound, 2500-page treatise called The Nature of Order. Merely reading it is a project unto itself, let alone trying to apply it to software development.
This newsletter is a serialized essay, a personal attempt by me, Dorian Taylor (of Method & Structure) to do just that: reconcile the work of Christopher Alexander—specifically his later work, The Nature of Order—with the craft of software development. The core of this project is to take the Fifteen Properties—the successors to Alexander’s patterns—and map them onto the the world of software.
You will get the most out of this series if you have:
I will be mailing out new chapters to this limited-run, exclusive, subscriber-only newsletter every 2-3 weeks. Each chapter will discuss one of the Fifteen Properties from the text, and how one might think about it through the lens of software and software development. Once I make it through all the properties, I anticipate having to do at least one more chapter synthesizing what precedes it, and concluding the series, which I anticipate to wrap up sometime in early 2023.
I have priced the subscription at USD $7 per month. (or, pay a more-easily expensed one-time fee of USD $70). What that gets you is the essay in your inbox as I write it. Join us!
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The Nature of Software