Re: Design Pattern thoughts

Ed,

Thanks for posting this, I appreciate the thoughtful response.

Where does one piece of code end, and another begin?
No code exists in isolation.

This is a good question - and perhaps we don't need an answer. The same
is true of all texts: no text exists in isolation, hence the very word
"context".

So, we're talking, "Levels," of code, in some sense.

Absolutely.

The word "isolation" in the sentence above derives its meaning from
uncounted other sentences which also use it. Still, no one would need to
examine all these sentences in order to criticize my post. Just the same
way you don't need to read all the various levels of implementation
below the method println(), down to the electrons - it's enough to know
what println means.

So, we can criticize a program on the same basis that we criticize a
text: we try to establish its overall meaning, try to establish the
meanings of smaller pieces or isolated aspects of it and check for
consistency between these meanings; from there we can reconstruct the
author's intent and check if the text achieves its intent, and so on.

So this is all taken with a bit of subjectiveness.

Well, there will always be some nuances that are subjective, where at
one point one person could say "the author should have used 'purple'
instead of 'mauve'" and another person reasonably disagree, without
there being a final fact of the matter.

But I think as far as looking into "easy to debug and maintain" there
will be a lot of the program text that many of us will agree about, and
if "high degree of intersubjective agreement" isn't the same as
"objective fact" it's close enough for QA work. ;)

So I'm going to wade in with my own Java code.
Not that I'm a master, or I think it's the smallest, most legible
piece of code

Well, the reason I asked for people to point to code they thought was
exemplar was to avoid criticizing someone's code before them and in
public - this requires a particular kind of setting (see e.g. Richard
Gabriel's book on writing workshops). And I still prefer not to do that
at this point and in this place. I do appreciate your posting an example
however.

Laurent
.

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