Vancouver Lisp Users Group meeting for October 2008 - The Nature of Order
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The following meeting announcement (a talk by Richard Gabriel on
Christopher Alexander's "The Nature of Order") was forwarded to me by
Gregor Kiczales as he thought it might be of interest to lispvan
members, so it's not (strictly speaking) a
lispvan meeting. However,
since the speaker (Richard Gabriel) is a famous lisper and the host
(Gregor Kiczales) is a famous lisper and it's being held in Vancouver,
we'll claim it anyhow! ;-)
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Richard Gabriel, he
is known in the Lisp community for many things (see:
http://www.dreamsongs.com); however, he is probably best known for:
- His essay on "Worse is Better" (http://www.dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html)
- His book "Patterns of Software" (http://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf)
Christopher Alexander is best known to programmers through his book "The Timeless Way of Building", which had a big influence on the Design Patterns movement. His books tend to appeal to both the right and left sides of our brains. Therefore, Richard Gabriel is probably one of the best possible choices for a speaker about Alexander's new 4-book essay called "The Nature of Order" (http://www.natureoforder.com/).
I look forward to attending the talk. See you there!
Here's the "official" meeting notice:
Topic: The Nature of Order
Presenter: Richard P. Gabriel, IBM Research
Host: Gregor Kiczales, Software Practices Lab, University of British Columbia
Date: Wednesday, October 8, 2008
Time: 5:00 pm
Venue: The UBC campus in the Hugh Dempster Pavilion building, room DMP 101 (for map, see: http://regi4.adm.ubc.ca/classroomservices/function/viewlocation?userEvent=ShowLocation&buildingID=DMP&roomID=101)
Summary: The second talk by Richard Gabriel is part of a special meeting of CPSC 539K. We'll begin with a presentation by Gabriel, followed by discussion of his talk and our reading from Alexander's Nature of Order. Everyone is invited to attend the talk.
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:
"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.
