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Neal Ford 4.03
Description:
The Gang of Four book was actually 2 books: a nomenclature describing common software problems and a recipe book for solutions. The vocabulary they defined is still useful. The recipes are a disaster! Ruby has powerful meta-programming facilities far beyond the languages encompassed by the GoF. It turns out that many of the structural design patterns in the Gang of Four book and beyond are much easier to solve with meta-programming.
This session compares and contrasts the "traditional" approach of design patterns with a more nuanced meta-programming approach. Using language features creates cleaner abstractions with fewer lines of code and little or no additional structure.
Links: Website
Comments on this Talk
It was nice to see Neal put Design Patterns into historical perspective. When the GoF wrote their book the available computer languages did not have the dynamic nature of Ruby. Therefore the patterns (and UML) were needed to add structures to primitive languages.
Neal's strength is amazing slideware. He finds great photos, and puts code in very cleanly. His slides simply look unnaturally great.
The topics are often just outside the range of what people are familiar with yet compelling and so people feel they are getting their money's worth by attending conferences.