Catfish in the Memepool

A Pattern Language: Crib Notes

I stumbled across, in the course of my customary World Wide Web Woolgathering this afternoon, upon these crib notes for all 253 of the patterns in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language...

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More woolgathering: A City is Not a Tree, by Christopher Alexander. I'd never seen it until today, but it covers some of the same turf we'd attempted to cover in our paean to Piecemeal Growth a few years back. Alexander's treatment is, of course, considerably more elegant and comprehensive that ours. (Seriously, there is no comparison.)

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One of the overarching themes of Catfish in the Memepool has always been intended to be the futility of the pursuit of classical originality in the twenty-first century. Catfish are, after all, the quintessential bottom feeders. So I checked, and discovered that A-List techie meme arbitrageur Clay Shirkey (a fellow whose compilations I enjoy, but am evidently behind on) had already raided this tomb. I learned this, in turn, here. I chased down Clay's citation, only to find him, in essence, briefly lamenting the same thing before embarking on his discourse on the content of this Johnson Administration Era (1965) gem. (This paper will be forty years old in May.)

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A City is not a Tree (Alternate Source)

Posted by foote at November 26, 2004 09:23 AM