“Alexander was the author or principal author of many books, including A Pattern Language, one of the best-selling architectural books of all time.”
In 1965 Alexander wrote A City Is Not a Tree, one of the earliest attacks on sprawl-style planning. He also designed and built more than 200 buildings, so he was not just a theorist. Programmers borrowed his pattern language for software design. They kept the vocabulary and mostly dropped his point, which was that the people who live in a place should shape it.