Another Take on Design Patterns

Rick DeNatale — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 16:48:00 -0400

Most programmers these days are familiar with, or at least aware of the now classic “Gang of Four” book Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

One of the recurring arguments about design patterns is how they relate to individual programming languages. The “Gang of Four,” Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, were by majority, proponents of strongly typed languages. Ralph was the sole representative of Smalltalk and the rest of the dynamic object oriented languages. As a result, The GOF book had and has more resonance with the C++ community and it’s successors. Although there are some Smalltalk examples in the book, many of the patterns express things which are easier, and in some cases unnecessary to express in a dynamically typed language. I find this a bit ironic, since the whole patterns movement seems to have started when Ward Cunningham and Kent Beck, two of the best known Smalltalkers, discovered the work of architect Christopher Alexander and thought that his approach to building and municipal design could be translated to the design of software.

As I was browsing today, I was reminded that there is another “Design Patterns” book, “The Design Patterns Smalltalk Companion” by Sherman Alpert, Bobby Woolf, and Kyle Brown. Which might be of interest to not just Smalltalkers but also Rubyists, since it approaches the subject from they dynamic language point of view. It’s not easy to find, but Amazon has a few copies in stock.

Sherm was one of the researchers in the IBM User Interface Institute which was housed in the same building where John Vlissides and Richard Helm of the “GOF” worked, the IBM Watson Research center in Yorktown Heights, NY. I spent quite a bit of time with Sherman and the rest of the UI institute team under John T. Richards back in the late-1980s to early 1990s. Bobby and Kyle were OO consultants, who I also knew through Knowledge Systems Corp.

You never know what you might learn from the old Smalltalkers.

Talk Like A Duck: Tag design_patterns

Another Take on Design Patterns