malvasia bianca

I’ve been on a bit of a Christopher Alexander kick for the last couple of years. At first, I started reading his most famous books, but those were good enough to leave me curious about what else he’d written. Not all of which is great, but enough is to keep me going.

Still, it’s taken me a while to get around to his book on carpets. For one thing, it’s out of print, and it took me a while to find a copy at a price that I’m willing to pay. For another thing, I don’t particularly care about carpets! But I finally found a copy, which I started reading earlier this week.

And I was completely blown away right from the start. Mainly because of the pictures: I was completely unprepared for the colors that are used in the carpets that he gives as early examples. But he also starts right off with a point that is really resonating with me right now:

What is often called the “detail” of the building—its fine structure—is not some kind of icing on the cake, but … the essence of what it is, and how it makes its impact upon us. (pp. 7–8)

The small stuff matters just as much as the big stuff; the power of the big stuff comes in large part out of the small stuff.

Translated into programming terms: keep your code clean, make every line as expressive as it can be. Which is something that I really enjoy doing, and I’m quite sure that I have a lot more to learn in that area. In particular, I’m fairly sure that there’s a lot more power to the notion that unexpected structure can arise somewhat spontaneously by determined refactoring than I’ve experienced so far. I don’t really believe that determined refactoring is all you need for good structure, but there too I have a lot to learn: where do you need more design, and what sort of extra design do you need?

(Side note: if I’m remembering correctly, Lisa Crawford told me once that Gustav Leonhardt spent a lot of time working with his students on how to best play short musical phrases. This sort of ability worked great for him, but apparently left some of his students able to play pieces in ways that sounded good at the small scale but didn’t work out so well in the large.)

But I’m not getting nearly enough practice at this. In my pet project at home, I’m trying to keep the code expressive and free from duplication, but there’s only so much you can learn from a thousand lines of code. I’ve had some interesting experiences at work, but there’s a lot of legacy code there, and I can’t responsibly spend large amounts of time cleaning it up.

Having the team as a whole spend small amounts of time cleaning it up is something that would be responsible for me to push on; I haven’t been very successful in balancing that against other activities with more immediate payoff so far, but I want to keep on trying. Even if that is successful, though, what I’ll get out of it will be different: I’ll learn a lot about balancing competing short-term and long-term demands, which is great, but I won’t have the experiences of uncovering structure myself.

What to do? One possibility is to try to work on a bigger project myself at home. I don’t feel like I have any big ideas bursting out right now, though. (Do any of my readers? I’m open to collaboration…) Another possibility would be to spend some time on evenings and weekends cleaning up the work code base. That sounds more reasonable; it still raises issues as to whether or not I’d be acting responsibly in doing so (since I’d be doing so for my own benefit, and I wouldn’t want that to hurt my team, e.g. by setting a bad example or depriving them of pleasure/learning opportunities), but in the balance I think that would be okay.

Or I could find a medium-sized open source project with an interesting code base to get involved in. That’s also an intriguing idea, and one that could have other benefits (and, to be sure, down sides); I have a few ideas in the back of my mind, but nothing concrete yet. I’m certainly open to suggestions on this front.

I’ll think it over for a few months: balancing the demands of existing programming projects, learning Japanese, reading blogs, blogging, playing video games, and of course reading books is quite a challenge as is. So, realistically, something has to give, which probably means that I have to wait until I’m done with my current personal programming project, and I already have another couple ones sketched out after it. But maybe in three or six months I’ll have managed to carve out a bit more time.

Back to the book. I’m not as in love with the rest of the first part of the book as I was with the beginning. He’s spending a lot of time talking about centers; I’d already seen those ideas in more refined form in The Phenomenon of Life. Still, it’s interesting enough, and I’m now pretty curious about the catalog of carpets that makes up most of the book.

I now have all of his earlier books except for The Linz Cafe: that one I have been unable to find at a price that I’m willing to pay. I just put in an interlibrary loan request for it, though. Once I’m done with it, I guess I’ll reread The Phenomenon of Life, and then move on to the rest of The Nature of Order.