General talk about software patterns

[Pascal Costanza <pc AT p-cos.net>]

Dear Patternites,


I forward the following announcement by Charlotte Herzeel to you. The event 
is going to take place at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 
Brussels, Belgium.

************

The Software Languages Lab cordially invites you to attend a lecture on 
Patterns by Richard Gabriel, Distinguished Engineer at IBM Research, founding 
member of the patterns community, and widely known for his work on Artificial 
Intelligence, object-oriented programming and the OOPSLA conferences,  Common 
Lisp and the Common Lisp Object System, and his drive to push computer 
science forward into radical new directions. 

Date: February 23rd 2010 (Tuesday), from 2-5 pm.
Location: Software Languages Lab, VUB, room 10F720.

Attendance is free, however we kindly ask you to register by replying to this 
email 
tolectures AT soft.vub.ac.be
 (preferably before February 15th). 
(mailto:charlotte.herzeel AT vub.ac.be
 for questions)

Please find the abstract and title of the talk below.

************

The Nature of Order

Christopher Alexander is best known to computer scientists and software 
engineers for his work on pattern languages. This work inspired the classic 
"Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software," by Eric 
Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, as well as the 
software patterns community and its dozens if not hundreds of patterns books 
and 5 conferences a year.

Alexander is an architect whose real interest lies in understanding the 
nature of beauty and its objective reality. This project has held his 
attention for over 30 years and culminated in the publication of his 
gargantuan 4-book essay called "The Nature of Order." In it he attempts 
nothing short of proposing a new scientific method and cosmology to replace 
the Cartesian / reductionist / mechanistic approach to science and the 
neutral underlying space-time-matter view of the world; and while he's at it, 
he proposes a *common sense* way to understand the incomprehensible 
mathematics of quantum mechanics. (Along the way he also unifies science, 
art, and the spiritual.)

We once believed his ideas had something to do with how to design and build 
software, and the metaphor of software creation and architecture & the 
built-world is still strong. His ideas about centers, life, & wholeness; the 
Fundamental Process; the 15 structure-preserving transformations; deep and 
personal feeling as a valid scientific means of observation; sequences and 
the process of unfolding; the fundamental unity of function and ornament; 
patterns as generic centers; the subdued brilliance of color; the underlying 
"ground," "plenum," Self, and "the I"; and his use of sadness to find beauty 
are hard to understand without understanding all of his work - his many and 
convoluted books, papers, and essays, and the buildings he's built - and even 
the arc of his life. He is a maddeningly simplistic, complex, and frustrating 
man, filled with a luminous beauty painted in grayed storm-swept colors.

I have taken the time, over the past nearly 20 years, to (try to) understand 
his work, and to a degree the man. This talk  - not the talk itself but the 
ideas in it - will leave you confused, profoundly smarter, reeling, in 
despair, and suffused by joy about what is possible for us in software and 
programming. Whenever I speak of Alexander and his work, I feel like a 
shimmering bright and deceptive Prometheus.

************

Bio: Richard P. Gabriel is a Distinguished Engineer (sic re: the engineer 
part at least) at IBM Research.http://dreamsongs.com or:

"Black Out"

A tavern in Old Europe. Late in the evening. Participants at a psychology 
conference chat.

Canadian: In fact I mostly go to computer science conferences.
American: Really, is there anything interesting to discuss?
C: Well, sometimes there is. I have high hopes for this conference called 
"Onward!".
A: What is it about?
C: All kinds of things. It was started by Richard Gabriel, and he...
A: Who?
C: Gabriel.
A: You mean Richard Gabriel the *poet*???

Curtain.

*************

Kind Regards,

Charlotte Herzeel 
Lectures@Software
 Languages Lab 

-- 
Pascal Costanza, 
mailto:pc AT p-cos.net,
 http://p-cos.net
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Software Languages Lab
Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium