7 ms·

I remember reading this when it was new. foreach only works on a list. I can bless a list of lists into a rose tree, but i can't traverse that in a uniform way

by jfoutz 10y ago

I remember reading this when it was new. foreach only works on a list. I can bless a list of lists into a rose tree, but i can't traverse that in a uniform way. There's just no hook to say, when the thing isn't a list, get the next element like this. Now days i'd point at haskell's traversable as the gold standard. On large java projects it seems like composite/facade for days. Those splits seemed to let teams work together and not end up with piles of rubble. A lot of my understanding of programmer fashion back then was pretty fuzzy. It was easy to ask any team if they were doing extreme programming and they'd all respond, well, kinda. Ask any team if they were using a pattern language, and they'd mumble about UML. Sort of the equivalent of well, kinda. When you have to write a large project like a compiler or a web browser or something, it's handy to have around. All to often I stare at the empty text window in my ide and question my life choices. I wonder why i didn't learn to weld and why i'm a failure at everything i try. The existential dread fills my soul and i want to just crawl under my desk and cry. In that case, i'll flip through the GoF. Then i tell that endless abyss "I'm going to use the Command Pattern!" The abyss slinks back into the corner quietly murmuring until i feed it a couple beers at the end of the day. On the other hand, i did quite a bit of perl programming around 2000, so i'm probably weird.

skrebbel 10y ago
From the postscript of this slide deck: It appears to me that almost everyone who has read this has completely missed the point, even though I said it twice in big letters. People keep sending me mail that says things like this: > I just read through you article "Design Patterns" Aren't. I'm afraid you got it all backwards. At least the iterator example is totally flawed. Or people spend a lot of time arguing about how foreach is not analogous to an iterator pattern, or how it doesn't do the same thing, or how even if it does, I'm still wrong, because Perl has no analogous replacement for a model-view-controller pattern, blah blah blah. None of this has anything to do what the point of my talk. I really wish I'd left out the thing about the iterator pattern. Why do people focus on pages 4, 5, and 6 of a 13-page talk, and forget all about slides 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13, where I make the real point? I have a few theories. One theory is that most of these people are technical experts. They're equipped to consider technical issues, but not much else. When all you have is a hammer, all you can see are the nails. That's what happened to the guy above who said I "got it all backwards." What? The point of my talk was that we need to take a fresh look at Chrsitopher Alexander; if I got it backwards does that mean he thinks we should avoid taking a fresh look at Christopher Alexander? Or does he think that Alexander should be looking at us instead? No, he just forgot about everything after slide 7.
- jfoutz 10y ago
  It appears to me that almost everyone who commented on my comment completely missed the point, even though i made it three different ways. Why do people focus on paragraph 2, when paragraph 5 is where i make the real point? Facing a big coding challenge is hard, and having an abstract language for describing how to structure a solution is valuable to the point of protecting sanity. I have a few theories. One theory is that most of these people are technical experts. They're equipped to consider technical issues, but not much else. When all you have is a hammer, all you can see are the nails.
  - skrebbel 10y ago
    fyi i don't understand why you're getting downvoted, and touché.
    - jfoutz 10y ago
      To be fair, it was pretty snarky. It was meant to be silly not hurtful. In my experience, people pick and choose what they need at the time. I don't think it's unreasonable to say conversations like this happen all the time. Dev1: Hey, i need to test my control flow, but i need the register allocator. Dev2: Oh yeah, I put together a facade for register allocation that just does LRU and injects the push/pop pairs to do the right thing. I couldn't get away with a simple interface because there's some weird shared state. The graph coloring allocator is hard, and will take me some time to get ready. Facade is kind of code for a leaky abstraction. It communicates a lot about how the api really works. Most of the stuff in GoF got picked over and teams took what they needed. Are you doing design patterns? well, kinda. In that sense, i think it did a lot in the Christopher Alexander spirit. The original author wasn't wrong, just look at FactoryFactoryBuilderFactoryMadness from java's crazy times. But i don't think that's a fair characterization of the entire field of programming.
      - mattmanser 10y ago
        The problem is you buried your point in the 5th sentence in the 5th paragraph of basically a rant. And it's wrong. No modern programmer does that any more. When I first came here 9 years ago people would refer to patterns all the time. But this is the first time I've seen the GoF even mentioned in a year or so. People stopped caring about design patterns years ago because they stopped being relevant. And good riddance, the whole thing was a farce that spawned factoryFactoryFactories and newbies constantly asking how to implement a singleton because actually they wanted glorified global variables because they can't program properly. Where the GoF completely failed, javascript, ironically, saved us (with Crockford doing the nudging). It forced functional paradigms, lambda expressions, anonymous types, function objects, etc. into the mainstream languages where lisp had failed and almost overnight made design patterns obsolete. It fundamentally changed how we programmed so that the problems the patterns aimed to solve weren't problems any more.
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digsmahler 10y ago
I'm a 40-something programmer learning to weld. It's really fun! You can do it too.
- wballard 10y ago
  Same here. Totally agree. Check out the new weldment and pipe features in OnShape, just noticed this last night.
bunderbunder 10y ago
You're absolutely right. But I also think the author's getting at something slightly different - it sort of goes back to that popular barb that design patterns are just a way to make up for a language's shortcomings. At the time this was written, doing something like foreach in most languages was a horrible PITA. And if you had a language like foreach, and you were watching people use the iterator pattern (which, I realize, is more powerful, but mostly it would get used for stuff that foreach could handle), you'd definitely shake your head sadly to see all the sweating it would take to express simple concepts, and you'd think, "Geez, why are most programming languages so awful?" A lot of languages stayed awful for a long time. Java only recently got better, I think partially in response to pressure from .NET. Nowadays, though, even C++ is a wildly different beast, so the point the article was trying to make has lost a lot of its poignance.
sundvor 10y ago
> When you have to write a large project like a compiler or a web browser or something, it's handy to have around. All to often I stare at the empty text window in my ide and question my life choices. You absolutely nailed that feeling. And yes, it is indeed useful to have a repository (he) of patterns, just so you can start throwing them at the problem until you find something that sticks.
Patient0 10y ago
Your second to last paragraph is brilliant. Forget welding - you should write a novel!

by jfoutz 10y ago

skrebbel 10y ago

From the postscript of this slide deck: It appears to me that almost everyone who has read this has completely missed the point, even though I said it twice in big letters. People keep sending me mail that says things like this: > I just read through you article "Design Patterns" Aren't. I'm afraid you got it all backwards. At least the iterator example is totally flawed. Or people spend a lot of time arguing about how foreach is not analogous to an iterator pattern, or how it doesn't do the same thing, or how even if it does, I'm still wrong, because Perl has no analogous replacement for a model-view-controller pattern, blah blah blah. None of this has anything to do what the point of my talk. I really wish I'd left out the thing about the iterator pattern. Why do people focus on pages 4, 5, and 6 of a 13-page talk, and forget all about slides 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, and 13, where I make the real point? I have a few theories. One theory is that most of these people are technical experts. They're equipped to consider technical issues, but not much else. When all you have is a hammer, all you can see are the nails. That's what happened to the guy above who said I "got it all backwards." What? The point of my talk was that we need to take a fresh look at Chrsitopher Alexander; if I got it backwards does that mean he thinks we should avoid taking a fresh look at Christopher Alexander? Or does he think that Alexander should be looking at us instead? No, he just forgot about everything after slide 7.

jfoutz 10y ago
It appears to me that almost everyone who commented on my comment completely missed the point, even though i made it three different ways. Why do people focus on paragraph 2, when paragraph 5 is where i make the real point? Facing a big coding challenge is hard, and having an abstract language for describing how to structure a solution is valuable to the point of protecting sanity. I have a few theories. One theory is that most of these people are technical experts. They're equipped to consider technical issues, but not much else. When all you have is a hammer, all you can see are the nails.
- skrebbel 10y ago
  fyi i don't understand why you're getting downvoted, and touché.
  - jfoutz 10y ago
    To be fair, it was pretty snarky. It was meant to be silly not hurtful. In my experience, people pick and choose what they need at the time. I don't think it's unreasonable to say conversations like this happen all the time. Dev1: Hey, i need to test my control flow, but i need the register allocator. Dev2: Oh yeah, I put together a facade for register allocation that just does LRU and injects the push/pop pairs to do the right thing. I couldn't get away with a simple interface because there's some weird shared state. The graph coloring allocator is hard, and will take me some time to get ready. Facade is kind of code for a leaky abstraction. It communicates a lot about how the api really works. Most of the stuff in GoF got picked over and teams took what they needed. Are you doing design patterns? well, kinda. In that sense, i think it did a lot in the Christopher Alexander spirit. The original author wasn't wrong, just look at FactoryFactoryBuilderFactoryMadness from java's crazy times. But i don't think that's a fair characterization of the entire field of programming.
    - mattmanser 10y ago
      The problem is you buried your point in the 5th sentence in the 5th paragraph of basically a rant. And it's wrong. No modern programmer does that any more. When I first came here 9 years ago people would refer to patterns all the time. But this is the first time I've seen the GoF even mentioned in a year or so. People stopped caring about design patterns years ago because they stopped being relevant. And good riddance, the whole thing was a farce that spawned factoryFactoryFactories and newbies constantly asking how to implement a singleton because actually they wanted glorified global variables because they can't program properly. Where the GoF completely failed, javascript, ironically, saved us (with Crockford doing the nudging). It forced functional paradigms, lambda expressions, anonymous types, function objects, etc. into the mainstream languages where lisp had failed and almost overnight made design patterns obsolete. It fundamentally changed how we programmed so that the problems the patterns aimed to solve weren't problems any more.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

digsmahler 10y ago

I'm a 40-something programmer learning to weld. It's really fun! You can do it too.

wballard 10y ago
Same here. Totally agree. Check out the new weldment and pipe features in OnShape, just noticed this last night.

bunderbunder 10y ago

You're absolutely right. But I also think the author's getting at something slightly different - it sort of goes back to that popular barb that design patterns are just a way to make up for a language's shortcomings. At the time this was written, doing something like foreach in most languages was a horrible PITA. And if you had a language like foreach, and you were watching people use the iterator pattern (which, I realize, is more powerful, but mostly it would get used for stuff that foreach could handle), you'd definitely shake your head sadly to see all the sweating it would take to express simple concepts, and you'd think, "Geez, why are most programming languages so awful?" A lot of languages stayed awful for a long time. Java only recently got better, I think partially in response to pressure from .NET. Nowadays, though, even C++ is a wildly different beast, so the point the article was trying to make has lost a lot of its poignance.

sundvor 10y ago

> When you have to write a large project like a compiler or a web browser or something, it's handy to have around. All to often I stare at the empty text window in my ide and question my life choices. You absolutely nailed that feeling. And yes, it is indeed useful to have a repository (he) of patterns, just so you can start throwing them at the problem until you find something that sticks.

Patient0 10y ago

Your second to last paragraph is brilliant. Forget welding - you should write a novel!