Read this story from this site (https://www.metropolismag.com/technology/the-pattern-technology-of-christopher-alexander/): In 1987, Bill Croft, a programmer, gave a copy of A Pattern Language to Ward Cunningham, a software engineer. This was a bestselling treatise on architectural patterns written by Chrisopher Alexander. The book inspired Cunningham to create a repository of good software design patterns. He developed a new platform to enable 1000s of collaborators to populate this repository. The platform was a wiki.^[Cunningham thought of the name when he was waiting for a shuttle on his honeymoon in Honolulu - called 'Wiki Wiki', which is Hawaiian for 'quick.'] This eventually led to the development of Wikipedia. Cunningham continued to create new movements in software design, such as Extreme Programming and Agile Software. Both of these are based on ideas from A Pattern Language. But lest we become too enamored of the greatness of books, we should be reminded of what they might cause us to lose. [[Reading books made us forget how to read the world]]