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 [email protected] (preferably before February 15th). (mailto:[email protected] 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 lectu...@software Languages Lab -- Pascal Costanza, mailto:[email protected], http://p-cos.net Vrije Universiteit Brussel Software Languages Lab Pleinlaan 2, B-1050 Brussel, Belgium _______________________________________________ patterns-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://lists.cs.uiuc.edu/mailman/listinfo/patterns-discussion
