[MUD-Dev] Re: Analysis and specification - the dirty words of mud development?

[J C Lawrence]

On Tue, 23 Jun 1998 17:26:02 -0700 (PDT) 
Adam Wiggins<adam at angel.com> wrote:

> On Tue, 23 Jun 1998, J C Lawrence wrote:

>> Niklas Elmqvist<d97elm at dtek.chalmers.se wrote: 

>>> Another must-buy for O-O design zealots is "Design Patterns
>>> Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software" written by Gamma,
>>> Vlissides, Johnson and Helm (incidentially, these four are called
>>> Gang of Four or GoF for short).

>> An absolute must-have.  Utterly wonderful, and amazingly humbling.
>> Don't expect to understand it on the first reading.  The authors
>> didn't claim to understand it as they wrote it (see the preface).

> I read this about a year ago on the recommend of a friend.  The
> thing I found the most interesting about it was that much (maybe
> even most) of the stuff that was in there was things I had come up
> with on my own, just not nearly so elegantly, and I had never
> thought of them as being seperate "paterns", just things I thought
> up to solve a specific problem.

My first take on it was slightly similar:  "Damn!  Every single really 
neat or clever thing I ever thought of as a programmer has been put
down here, named, catalogued, diagramed, analysed, and pinned out like 
a bug on a board!"  I found it humbling.

> So though someone who has been doing OO programming for a while will
> probably not learn anything completely new, it does wonders to
> solidify and clarify the concepts that you've probably already been
> using for a while, not to mention give you some good names by which
> to call them.

I find its main value in two areas:  as a catalogue of possible
approaches ("patterns") which I use much like a cookbook in picking
the recipe of choice, and as brain-fart-breaker used when I'm just not 
getting anywhere trying to mangle a concept into workability.

--
J C Lawrence                               Internet: claw at null.net
(Contractor)                               Internet: coder at ibm.net
---------(*)                     Internet: claw at under.engr.sgi.com
...Honourary Member of Clan McFud -- Teamer's Avenging Monolith...