Pattern Oriented Software Architecture Volume 5: On Patterns and Pattern Languages

Foreword by Wayne Cool

Way back I fell in with a bunch hot on the trail of a revolution in programming, hefting on their backs the unwieldy and orthodoxless ideas of a mad architect himself bent on revving the future by reviving the past in the splendor of its design sense¹ but not its design [Ale79]. This cool group holed up in retreats and self-concocted workshops, never in a mainstream meet-up but in contrast to official miracles, in a far-off locale, some backwater or Podunk which although unverifiable is visitable.² Unlike the madman who crowed ‘beauty beauty beauty,’ this crew worked the nuts, oiled the bolts, screwed together a practice and a program, a practicality and a precision straight-aimed at the practitioner and around the corner from theory.

Along the way I hopped from PLoP to PLoP, café to bar, beer to Star-bucks; I was there when Beck proclaimed, when the workshops wound up, when the rainstorm first came up on the parquet Allerton floor, when the sun rose at Irsee, when the trail rides ended and the dust settled in Wickenberg; I was there when the books were written, reviewed, printed, and praised. Through all this I watched the interest grow in design and the structure of man-made things, in the strength of the written word aimed at the creation of a built-up world made of ideas and abstractions but felt like the built world of wood and shellac, stone and metal rods.

And this is what I want to come to: the realm of software patterns converts the world of surfaces—a ...