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Kickaha
Veteran Member
 
Join Date: May 2004
 
2011-05-14, 00:13

Bingo. GoF is too damned high level for beginning programmers to grok, and they end up just cutting and pasting, thereby kind of eliminating the whole &*(%@$ point of patterns.

The title is "Elemental Design Patterns" (EDPs). It's the first collection of tiny little design patterns out of a body of research I did my PhD work on, called SPQR. Essentially what I did was to create a formal calculus for design pattern definition and composition, then start at the foundation of basic OO theory and puzzle out what the 'atomic' patterns had to be.

Well actually I puzzled out what the formal framework for the patterns had to be, kind of like a periodic table, then started filling them in. Those are the EDPs. They're small, easily understandable by even beginning students, and composable into the more familiar design patterns very quickly.

I also establish a graphical notation for working with patterns called PIN (Pattern Instance Notation) that I've had published at one conference and this summer, in the Journal of Visual Language and Computing. (Also a mild possibility it will be made an OMG standard this fall to stand alongside UML.)

So. Take one OO-theory-derived calculus of design, a new pattern graphical notation that is based off of it, an approach for abstracting away implementation details from design concepts, a bundle of EDPs that are defined in the formalisms as non-decomposable and atomic, a methodology for composing patterns together starting with the EDPs and working up to whatever level you like... and then explain it all to a beginner by stripping out all the math, the equations, and the formalisms so that they can learn how to think and reason about design at the same time that they learn how to program.

By the time they get through this book, they should be able to work with the GoF level patterns as living entities, not rote recipes.

That's the book. Sound interesting?
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