[osflash] Share the knowledge: Books

[The Irrelevant Elephant]

Cortlandt Winters wrote:
> I think you missunderstood Nicolas's tone as bitter or beligerent. I'd 
> say the tone was more a spritely "poking a dog with a stick" or a 
> jester's humor. Personally I thought the comments were hilarious, but I 
> can see how they could easily be missread. If you have a mental map of a 
> rigorously patterned application next to one done in a language where 
> the patterns are ingrained in the language, his statements become quite 
> funny. I believe the real intent is to make fun of how verbose Java (and 
> As2) are.

Sorry, I think perhaps I forget how little this text based medium gives 
away.  Nicolas poked the dog with a stick, and I intentionally assumed 
the role of the dog and took a bit - nothing more than facetious humour, 
really ;-)

I hope nothing I said came across too aggressive - I'm a pacifist, 
honest :-)

> Here's an example (though not perfect). The iterator pattern, taken from 
> the book, fills a dozen pages of description, half a dozen classes, each 
> with 30 lines of code just to create the structure. Why? To iterate over 
> two menus with a different underlying item types. In ML there is a 
> function called Map that is built in to do this for you. You don't need 
> to create half a dozen files for your interfaces, subtypes and 
> instances, it's built into the style and structure of the language so 
> that it's just not that verbose or complex. The same thing is going on, 
> but in one language it's handled transparently and in the other you 
> implement it with a verbose syntax and a pattern. Over and over you see 
> this with Java and Java type patterns and in the end it becomes kind of 
> funny, but only to those who have seen the comparable programs in 
> different languages.

At the same time, consider that the book is presenting an example 
implementation of the pattern - and not suggesting that every menu you 
ever build should use the Iterator pattern.  I don't believe for a 
second that you aren't aware that there are other ways to build a menu 
in an OOP language :)

- IE