Slashdot Mirror
'Design Patterns' Receives ACM SIGPLAN Award
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."
People with CS degrees get jobs writing software for money because, unfortunately for the rest of the world, software engineers blindly play with mathematical tools which they do not understand. Fantastic, you know how to take two algorithms you don't understand and glue them together as per the template pattern or create objects with a factory, the real problem arises when you have to design an algorithm which requires more than a for-loop and some arithmetic. Read some Dijkstra if you don't want to listen to me, he's much more interesting than the GoF especially if you ever want to write something more thought provoking than an inventory management system or a porn dialer. Go ahead and write $12 shareware for the rest of your life, I'll happily be working on theories you'll use time and time again and never be able to understand but pretend to be the expert on.