From Christopher Alexander

The first two sections deal heavily with the application of Patterns as the successful strategy behind creating an organic solution that not only grows up naturally to conquer the present problem, but can also grow to conquer future issues with ease (analogous to cities growing to take in more residents, businesses, etc.)
The first part bothered me the most of the three. Not because of what it was or wasn't saying, but because of it's heavy approach. Maybe I'm just too much the engineer but his phrasing just came over as pretentious and overlong.
The second section I found the most interesting because it seems to be suggesting that Patterns (architectural, software, etc.) are the tools we use to transform Platonic ideals into Aristotelian examples. His extensive discussion on Swiss builders all understanding "Barn" because they understand the patterns used to create does seem to account neatly for the differences in implementation but similar usage and appearance that seem to take place in each construction. I do not, however, agree with a comment he made about builders not trying techniques that do not fit their preconceived notion of barn to be disingenuous. After all, how can we build new things, new types of structures, without a willingness to cast off the shackles of our preconceived designs? I was struck upon reading his comment of the images of the various pyramids that are still standing in Egypt, and how a number of them show that clearly the idea of the pyramid was there, but the patterns for building it were not yet present. And it is this willingness to depart the current path to chart new designs and create new problems to be solved that we need in order to find these new patterns.

His comparison of Patterns to language is an interesting idea, but I'm not sure how much I believe that, if only because language, even in the hyper-evolutionary ring known as the internet, is still relatively slow to develop and accept new meanings, whereas engineering solutions can be disseminated relatively quickly assuming actionable evidence of correct function exists. Because my high school friends and I are still the only ones using "sw00t" as an exclamation of joy.

Part 3 seemed to me to be a rather straight forward discussion of user-permission based security and/or data access and storage procedures. Wherein the most important data (and the most sensitive data) should be accessed only by a few and contained at the "back" of your design.