Ludo: Here's the online slide deck from Mark Jason Dominus’ 2002 YAPC lightning talk “Design Patterns Aren’t”, on Professor Christoper Alexander, his book A Pattern Language, the ‘Gang of Four’ and design patterns.
APL was book two of a trilogy also incorporating The Timeless Way of Building (volume 1) and The Oregon Experiment (volume 3).
Alexander’s earlier work Notes on the Synthesis of Form was also a big hit with computer scientists in the 1960s, even though it, too, was primarily aimed at designers and architects. (And if you still have any empty shelves on your bookcase, Alexander’s 2002-2004 four-volume work The Nature of Order: An Essay on the Art of Building and the Nature of the Universe is apparently considered his magum opus; and he also published The Battle for the Life and Beauty of the Earth: A Struggle between Two World-Systems, about how his team designed & constructed a Japanese school, in 2012.)
Will: There's another book with a possibly contrasting view: Semantic Software Design. It says the main work in software is coming up with the concepts/paradigm/metaphor which explains what the software is doing. And also we shouldn't think of developers as manufacturers, builders or architects. But rather creative artists. Mainly because we never produce the same piece of work twice.
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