Advent Stitch a Day (17th December)

"Patterns are optimal solutions to common problems. As common problems are tossed around a community and are resolved, common solutions often spontaneously emerge. Eventually, the best of these rise above the din and self-identify and become refined until they reach the status of a Design Pattern."

http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/page.php?page=lifecycle

Computer science is using loads of our language's words. I mentioned earlier that it is not easy to find pages that contain certain words which are not about computers. It is a bit ineffective, as, if they go on like that, searching the net will mainly tell us about computers, where what we want is to learn about the (other) world. Anyway, at least I found this site which gives graphic pictures of what patterns are in computer science. It is the "Design Pattern Library" from Yahoo's developer network. Note the use of the word "community".

It seems clear that words are transposed sometimes from one "domain" into another for certain purposes. That was certainly how metaphors worked. But I see an important shift here, in that the different kinds of contexts become blurred, very quickly. The use of words in different contexts is not recognised as such, as metaphors, easily anymore. It is possible that in the not so far future a "bear" for example would first be something totally different than the animal species it originally designated, for the "community".

The pattern here today is shown in a tree. I found by the way this definition for "tree" in computer science: "A structure for organizing or classifying data in which every item can be traced to a single origin through a unique path."