Contemporary Design Art part 1
There are a ton of developers who can write a mean algorithm. They can identify a problem and manage to digest the salient points with enough success to plop out an implementation that does exactly what it says on the tin.
Interesting enough though, this has sweet FA to do with design. Yes, the piece of software performs its function beautifully, efficiently, and one could argue, elegantly. That says absolutely nothing about its design.
Java, specifically, goes a long way towards ramming down a set of design principles. Said principles are followed fairly blindly by most practitioners. The OSS world is awash with examples of people who have read the right books, but have absolutely no skill or talent at conceptualising or grokking the underlying principles behind the books. To them, the design pattern is an end goal, not a tool. To pick one example (out of thousands), look at Matt Raible’s OSS efforts. It has inheritance! It uses PATTERNS! It is LIGHTWEIGHT! Yet, I’d argue that it’s very badly designed (if you don’t believe me, just try getting it to do anything other than the very very basics.)
So what’s the acid test for a good design? I have no idea. The closest I could come up with is A good design allows your code to do things you never expected it to have to do. It’s not about ‘oh I’ll add an interface here so I can plop in different implementations’ when there’s no sane reason you’d ever need more than one implementation, for example. Having made that assertion though, I’d imagine it’s pretty clear by now that I have no solution or fix. If you’re into that sort of thing, you can try befriending a fowlerbot, working your way to the top, then perhaps running your genitalia over his beard in the hope of getting some use out of the smug bigoted little fucker.
