"A Pattern Language" was published in 1977. It has only been in existence for slightly less than 50 years. When it was published it was simultaneously a revolutionary and also completely niche book. It did not build on any kind of existing sub-discipline of architecture, and most architects ignored it entirely (an awful lot of them still do).
It took several decades for anyone to notice that there might perhaps be some interesting way to take what Alexander had done in the context of architecture and urban planning and apply it to software development. That did not happen "over 50 years" ago.
The reason why "the discipline always seems to be architecture" is because there are no other disciplines that are (a) synthetic (in the sense of being about creating something that did not exist before, rather than analytic) and (b) have an existing magnum opus that describes the patterns that humans have used for centuries to practice that discipline.
The sciences are not a useful parallel, precisely because they are analytical. Various artistic practices could be useful analogies because of their synthetic nature, but the practice of art is widely held to be a matter of personal self-expression, and hardly a place you'd go looking to find "best practices".
Thank you for correcting me. I was 10 to 20 years off. By all means, feel free to keep talking about design patterns for another 10 to 20 years then ;)
It took several decades for anyone to notice that there might perhaps be some interesting way to take what Alexander had done in the context of architecture and urban planning and apply it to software development. That did not happen "over 50 years" ago.
The reason why "the discipline always seems to be architecture" is because there are no other disciplines that are (a) synthetic (in the sense of being about creating something that did not exist before, rather than analytic) and (b) have an existing magnum opus that describes the patterns that humans have used for centuries to practice that discipline.
The sciences are not a useful parallel, precisely because they are analytical. Various artistic practices could be useful analogies because of their synthetic nature, but the practice of art is widely held to be a matter of personal self-expression, and hardly a place you'd go looking to find "best practices".