Passages

Richard P. Gabriel's Patterns of Software: Tales from the Software Community is the kind of book that Passages, as a column, aspires to bring back to the attention of the software community. I am fairly sure this book, from 1996, is largely forgotten, but I think it deserves a wide audience, to this day, because it has things to say that we still need to hear, and it says them well. It's not as obscure as some ''lost'' software books: it remains available in Kindle format, and is easily obtained (though it seems to be technically out of print) in hardback or softcover formats. However, the most recent review on Amazon is from April 2016, more than ten years ago, and I had never heard of the book until recently, when I was probing more deeply into the influence of Christopher Alexander's views on architecture on software engineering, trying to go beyond just ''everyone has read Design Patterns and knows about the visitor pattern, even people who don't care that much specifically about OO, like myself.''