influences.sgit.ai / register / Christopher Alexander / trace

Christopher Alexander — the trace table

The falsifiable part of the entry, on its own and with its sources attached. Each row is a claim that a pattern from the anchor work appears at a named place in the estate — checkable against the repositories, which is the only thing that separates this from a reading list.

Pattern from the anchorWhere the estate implements itVersionStatusSource of the row
Code as a space developers inhabit — judge it by navigability and comfortThe Designer role definition's review criteria—implementedteam/roles/designer/ROLE.md, quoted in 02__ §D1
A language of patterns — named solutions that compose, each referring to the ones above and below itNowhere. The estate has conventions and a house style; it has no pattern language, and the two are not the same thing—absentabsence across the corpus; the role definition names the lineage without building one
Patterns discovered from use rather than designed in advanceNowhere recorded. The estate's conventions were derived by counting the code on the coding sibling, which is the same method — but it was not done in Alexander's name and the connection is this site's inference—absentthis site's own reading; flagged as inference rather than evidence

Every row names where it came from. A trace row is only worth having if you can find out how it was arrived at, so the last column carries the document in the commissioning pack that supports it. No row on this site was written from memory or inference — where the evidence runs out, the row is marked absent or the table says so.

The same rows, as data

The influence map is computed from these files rather than drawn, so the graph cannot disagree with the tables it is made of.