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Jurgen Appelo's avatar

It didn't start with the Design Patterns book by the "gang of four."

It started with the seminal work of Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language, which precedes Design Patterns by almost twenty years.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/79766.A_Pattern_Language

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Bob Galen's avatar

You're right, Jurgen, thanks for adding. I'm sure there are even earlier works on the notion.

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Jurgen Appelo's avatar

I asked Perplexity, just to be sure. Seems there aren't any.

"The concept of pattern languages was invented by Christopher Alexander, an architect and design theorist, in the 1970s. No major references indicate that someone else formalized or published the "pattern language" concept as a systemic theory before Alexander. His 1977 book, "A Pattern Language," co-authored with Sara Ishikawa and Murray Silverstein, was the first comprehensive articulation of the idea and sparked the global pattern language movement spanning architecture, software, and many other fields."

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