Alexandrian Center

Difficult things to pin down. As described in the RugBook, "centers" are, according to ChristopherAlexander, the fundamental structures from which all aesthetically pleasing patterns are built.

Centers are things you notice. They are things you might give names to. They are things we perceive as structures. So, houses are centers, as are doors, doorknobs, and a circle on the end of a doorknob. Big centers are made up of little centers.

Oh - like objects? -- OleAndersen

If I am building a simulation of an exploding star in Fortran, none of the centers of the simulation are objects, because the system is not object-oriented. So, I take the question to mean "In an object-oriented system, are centers and objects the same thing?"

Maybe centers are objects, but I don't think objects are necessarily centers. In general, if I find that something is worth making a name for, I find that it is worth defining an object for it. But there are certainly objects that are not centers. In most object-oriented systems, some of the objects are needed for implementation purposes but are really not important to think about most of the time. -RalphJohnson

Curious, I always felt that the interfaces were more interesting - between inside and outside, between land and sea, between this and that; the centres were just homogenous fillings-in and things only distinguished themselves by how they set themselves apart from their surroundings.

CategoryJargon