R. Williams

Truly Unique, Extremely Valuable Entry, July 15 2004

Kind of funny, reading the reviews here makes it clear that this book is something of a sleeper, it has not gotten the exposure that a lot of the other pillars of the pattern community have. I think the reason is that people may glance at it and think that it is too domain-specific. In fact, this book does a lot of great things, it is a meditation on some crucial OO modeling issues.

The first problem Fowler broaches is a patient's weight and he states, correctly I'm sure, that most programmers would just make weight a class property and make it be of type integer. But there are problems with that approach. First one is the issue of units. If you make it an int you are assuming that it is… Read more

One of the Best by One of the Best, July 12 2004

Manchester is really phenomenal, and this is an amazing example. To be able to not only hold interest, but literally nail the reader to the floor is a talent rarely held by historians. His portrait of the Depression and Roosevelt is great, including the much anticipated, and yet desperate end of FDR. Totally disagree with the other reviewer who claims that Civil Rights excuse Tonkin and Vietnam. LBJ deserves little to no credit for Civil Rights, that was the result of MLK and a large contingent in the Congress and it would have passed with or without him. Anyway, if you want to read a book that covers this period beautifully and makes you wonder how history ever got a reputation as boring,… Read more

Elegance Succumbs to Giant Sucking Sound, July 11 2004

Reading the commentary on here is almost more entertaining.

Well, here are the few points I wanted to make that are not in the work itself and don't seem to be in here:

1. One of the most interesting parts of this thing is how the community responds to the idea of postulating about problems that cannot be observed. It almost plays like a Lutherian drama at that point (faith/works threatening to split a rift that will lead to civil war). But let's face it: a. the main discovery of the 20th C was uncertainty, which means that even if you can see the electron trail, you have not really succeeded in observing it (at least cleanly), and b. this is an edge that we are bound to have come upon… Read more