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'Design Patterns' Receives ACM SIGPLAN Award

Posted by timothy on from the good-idea-guys dept.

bth writes "ACM's Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) recently awarded the 2005 Programming Languages Achievement Award to Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides (known as the 'Gang of Four') for their creation of 'Design Patterns' (the computer science book and the subfield at the intersection of programming languages and software engineering). The annual award recognizes an individual (or individuals) who has (have) made a significant and lasting contribution to the field of programming languages."

9 of 223 comments (clear)

  1. terminology, methods, what? by Rubel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've worked with a couple of folks who swore by this book, but I never really heard much from them about why. Is it about good algorithms? Or larger design issues (such as)?

    Or is it more about just giving programmers a common vocabulary with which to discuss the way they bulid software?

    Is it good reading for an amatuer programmer, or more as an advanced topic?

    1. Re:terminology, methods, what? by fermion · · Score: 3, Insightful
      I think it is about idioms. There are standard ways to copy, iterate, and count. These standard not only make the code more readable, but also provides time tested methods to make the code reliable. Also using these idioms when writing code speeds up the process. There was a time when I could at sketch out a solution to a moderately complex problem in a day, flesh it out in another day or two, and then spend the rest of the time debugging and clarifying.

      When we moved to OOP, new idioms were needed. We kept many of the old ones, and the OOP made complying with some rules, such as the separation of data, presentations, and manipulation, simpler. This is what design patterns does. It provides a set of idioms that can be applied to classes of problems. Once these are learned, one should be able to quickly develop a robust solution.

      Take for example the singlet. It is a simple construct used when only one instance of an object is allowed. This happens more than one might imagine. I could sit down and think hard for a while and implement singlet, and then redesign, and debug, and after months of work come up with a good solution. Or I could just use the design pattern and in 20 minutes implement my singlet class.

      The second part of you question is more complex. I, like most programmer, created crude versions of the design patterns on my own before reading this book. I even saw I enforced some OO concepts on my structured programming. Once I read the book I quickly saw the uefulness and began to use the patterns in my professional work. OTOH, when I was coding some math stuff over the summer, I did not use the patterns because the work was not so suited to the patterns. If i were to publish the work, I might go back and rework to fit the idiom. OTOH I know that the book is used widely and knowing the basics are useful. So if you are coding for fun, it might not help that much. If you are coding to show others, it would help to put the code in a form people will recognize.

      --
      "She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
  2. Re:As mentioned by Paul Graham by whatthef*ck · · Score: 3, Insightful
    As mentioned by Paul Graham, in his essay "Revenge of the Nerds", Peter Norvig found that 16 of the 23 patterns in Design Patterns were "invisible or simpler" in Lisp.

    If I could make a decent living coding in Lisp, I might actually give a shit.

  3. Oh dear... by groman · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Oh my

    The quite possibly most useless book in the history of computer science gets an award. Somehow I am not that surprised, considering that everybody hails it as the end all of object oriented design and everything.

    To be honest, modern computer science curriculum seems to be wasting a lot of bright young potential on buzzwords. Patterns, paradigms, bleh. People somehow manage to get masters degrees in CS from Berkeley without even knowing what "turing complete", "Karnaugh map", "Rice's theorem", "Goedel's completeness theorem", "planar graph", "functional language", "church-turing thesis" are. But you ask them about a singleton, model-view controller or Java's security model in reflection and they're the fucking expert.

    Well that's barely computer science, that's just OO banging. Just because it uses paradigms and object oriented terms doesn't make it anything other than advanced code banging.

    1. Re:Oh dear... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Of course it isn't Computer Science, it is Software Engineering. The book helps you design software systems. Can Karnaugh maps do that?

      I find it useful with what I work on. If you don't then, maybe the book just isn't for your line of work.

      Design patterns are a tool, not a silver bullet. Get what you can out of them but don't be surprised when doesn't solve all the problems in the world.

    2. Re:Oh dear... by cratermoon · · Score: 3, Insightful

      People with CS degrees seem to get jobs writing software for money without knowing a thing about security, testing, defect discovery and removal, team organization, refactoring, design, technical writing, communication, estimating, abstractions and complexity management, business practices, communicating with users... well, anything needed to actually deliver working software that delivers value to the business.

      But, you know, in case that trucking company struggling with logistics needs to know about "turing complete", "Karnaugh map", "Rice's theorem", "Goedel's completeness theorem", "planar graph", "functional language", "church-turing thesis", they're golden.

    3. Re:Oh dear... by SirSlud · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Face it; software is now a commodity business. Using an automotive analogy, if you want to improve the performance or design of the internal combustion engine, go for it, but most software jobs these days only requires putting a kit together rather than having to push the envelope of science.

      Therefore, sure, Computer Science is science, but understand that its pure semantics. Its good that enrollment in CS is down, because most of the CS students during the boom were more interested in engineering (applying known scientific discoveries) than the science itself.

      The fact that employers looking for programmers ask for CS degrees is simply an indication that the industry is still fairly young. Software engineers used to come out of CS, but that trend is rightfully dwindling. Most programmers really should be trained in an engineering course, where the focus on economics and social responsibility are more pronounced.

      --
      "Old man yells at systemd"
    4. Re:Oh dear... by Anthony+Liguori · · Score: 3, Insightful

      People somehow manage to get masters degrees in CS from Berkeley without even knowing what "turing complete", "Karnaugh map", "Rice's theorem", "Goedel's completeness theorem", "planar graph", "functional language", "church-turing thesis" are.

      You're obviously trying to come off as pompus but seriously, do you even really know what you're talking about? What's so important about Karnaugh maps? It's a silly way as solving a system of boolean alegbra equations. Only really useful for introduction digital circuit design.

      If you want to talk about boolean logic, talk about predicate calculus, modus ponus, or something that actually deals with Computer Science theory.

      I understand where you're coming from and don't fully disagree but you sound like an ass. There's always someone with a more theoritical background than you so just don't do that.

      FWIW, the GoF are important because they were the *first* to do what they did--give programmers a common vocabularily to describe complex systems.

  4. An observation... by bunyip · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "Some is good, more is better, and too much is just about right."

    - This mantra is good for money, horsepower, disk space, but not design patterns...

    When somebody starts telling me that they used 5 different patterns in their program and they're proud of it - then I know the code is crap. Most of the pattern zealots I've seen write bloated, inefficient code. Sometimes I think they scour the literature looking for some extra patterns to put in.

    That said, these patterns do exist and programmers keep reinventing them. The key is knowing when to call it a pattern and go to the trouble of formalizing it versus just writing code. Alternatively, find a language that makes most of these go away.