Difficult things to pin down. As described in the
RugBook, "centers" are, according to
ChristopherAlexander, the fundamental structures from which all aesthetically pleasing patterns are built.
Centers are things you notice. They are things you might give names to.
They are things we perceive as structures. So, houses are centers, as
are doors, doorknobs, and a circle on the end of a doorknob. Big centers
are made up of little centers.
Oh - like objects? --
OleAndersen
If I am building a simulation of an exploding star in Fortran, none of the centers
of the simulation are objects, because the system is not object-oriented. So, I take the
question to mean "In an object-oriented system, are centers and objects the same thing?"
Maybe centers are objects, but I don't think objects are necessarily centers.
In general, if I find that something is worth making a name for, I find that
it is worth defining an object for it. But there are certainly objects that are not centers.
In most object-oriented systems, some of the objects are needed
for implementation purposes but are really not important to think about most of the
time. -
RalphJohnson
Curious, I always felt that the interfaces were more interesting - between inside and outside, between land and sea, between this and that; the centres were just homogenous fillings-in and things only distinguished themselves by how they set themselves apart from their surroundings.
CategoryJargon