When Christopher Alexander wrote the book "A Pattern Language" in 1977, it was a part of a 2 volume series, that tried to understand the sophistication of design in everyday buildings. It was trying to capture something that had been learnt over centuries, if not millenia.
He would not have understood the passion with which software engineering discipline embraced and then took over the conversation. Today, software engineers have carried design patterns to the extreme.
Somewhere along the way the meaning or rather the semantics of the word was altered from something that had been observed, to something that is closer in meaning to a blueprint or reference architecture.
Rather than capturing the underlying structure and beauty of a solution that is perfected over time by many generations of designers, and further repeated without formal training, and handed down from practitioner to practitioner, and finally discovered and rationalized by the master; it has been substituted to mean the opposite.
Design patterns in software now means something that is created by ivory tower architects and handed down to practitioners for consumption, to prevent others from doing the unthinkable, Think for themselves.
He would not have understood the passion with which software engineering discipline embraced and then took over the conversation. Today, software engineers have carried design patterns to the extreme.
Somewhere along the way the meaning or rather the semantics of the word was altered from something that had been observed, to something that is closer in meaning to a blueprint or reference architecture.
Rather than capturing the underlying structure and beauty of a solution that is perfected over time by many generations of designers, and further repeated without formal training, and handed down from practitioner to practitioner, and finally discovered and rationalized by the master; it has been substituted to mean the opposite.
Design patterns in software now means something that is created by ivory tower architects and handed down to practitioners for consumption, to prevent others from doing the unthinkable, Think for themselves.
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