Interview with Ken Arnold on Design

Bill Venners writes "Artima.com recently completed publishing a six-part interview with Ken Arnold on distributed systems, JavaSpaces, and design. In Perfection and Simplicity, Ken explains why there's no such thing as a perfect design and proposes the radical notion that programmers are people. In Taste and Aesthetics, Ken discusses the role of taste and arrogance in design, the value of other people's problems, and the virtue of simplicity. In Designing Distributed Systems, Ken addresses the concerns of distributed systems design, including the need to expect failure, avoid state, and plan for recovery. In Sway with JavaSpaces, Ken describes the basic idea of a JavaSpace, illustrates how decoupling leads to reliability. In Data, Decoupling, and Iteration, Ken explains how JavaSpaces lets you "throw in a grain and watch it grow." In Java Design Issues, Ken discusses whether to prohibit subclassing, whether to use Cloneable or copy constructors, and when to use marker interfaces."

Comments

C++

[GigsVT]

There is a phenomenon I call surface area of design, which is what you must understand about a design to know which part you care about. Does the fact that there are more than 200 methods mean anything to the setText() method?

This is an interesting point. I know a good bit of C++, but I don't often code in it. Why? Because I spend twice as much time looking up methods and classes than I do actually coding. Half the time I still later discover that I reinvented the wheel.