Thursday, November 04, 2004

Martin Fowler on OOPSLA 2004

OOPSLA2004 "Four patterns were voted off. Factory Method (due to the confusion over what it means - the pattern is different to the more common usage of the term), Bridge, Flyweight, and Interpreter. Two patterns, Singleton and Chain of Responsibility, were split decisions.

I found the votes and discussions interesting. Of course it's hard to really consider this without looking at alternatives. I was surprised that Singleton got away with a split decision, considering how unpopular it's become amongst my friends. Most of the others were voted off because people felt they were sufficiently uncommon and that other patterns would probably take their place, sadly we didn't have time to consider new members."

"Steve McConnell opened up day two. His talk focused on the ten year gap between the first and second edition of his excellent book Code Complete. Brian Foote summed it up as a "litany of things I agreed with". My sum up would be that the industry has made real progress in this area during the last decade, despite the usual views of skies falling in around us."

"Attacking software-as-manufacturing was particularly timely since every OOPSLA attendee got a copy of Software Factories in their goody bag. I've been aware of this work for a while, and my instinctive allergy to this metaphor was only reinforced by the "we need industrialization" motivations. Dig deeper, however, and there are good ideas in here - particularly the approach of integrated DomainSpecificLanguage capabilities."

It's good to see this was discussed as the two books I recently acquired were "Code Complete" and "Software Factories".

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