What is "pattern language"

n. (context architecture design software design English) A structured method of describing good design practices within a field of expertise.

A pattern language is a method of describing good design practices or patterns of useful organization within a field of expertise. The term was coined by architect Christopher Alexander and popularized by his book A Pattern Language.

A pattern language can also be an attempt to express the deeper wisdom of what brings aliveness within a particular field of human endeavor, through a set of interconnected patterns. Aliveness is one placeholder term for "the quality that has no name": a sense of wholeness, spirit, or grace, that while of varying form, is precise and empirically verifiable. Some advocates of this design approach claim that ordinary people can use it to successfully solve very large, complex design problems.

Pattern language may refer to:

• Pattern language is a structured method of documenting good design practices in architecture, software engineering, and other design disciplines
• A Pattern Language, a famous book written by Christopher Alexander on design patterns in architecture, which established the concept pattern language (see above)
• Pattern language (formal languages), a class of strings generated from a pattern by substitutions, in formal language theory and machine learning

In theoretical computer science, a pattern language is a formal language that can be defined as the set of all particular instances of a string of constants and variables. Pattern Languages were introduced by Dana Angluin in the context of machine learning.