Catching up ..

After a slow start the unit is now picking up. Since I last wrote a blog entry we have had 2 lectures at Portsmouth.

In the first I covered the 'Patterns Catalogue' exercise which I had previously run at St Patricks. This introduced the students to the idea of using a patterns catalogue to help solve a problem while at the same time giving a taster of Alexander's patterns. This lecture also covered the memento pattern and a substantial amount of time on the coursework. At the end of the lecture I asked the students to read pages 44-55 of Patterns of Software by Richard Gabriel in preparation for the next week...

However no one did the suggested reading - well one person was reading it online when I walked into the classroom. Wish they had - it would have helped them answer the seminar questions. We did however have an interesting discussion on whether coding was art or science or craft.

Paul Graham's book Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age" has some interesting discussion on the subject: amongst other things he talks about how Leonardo Da Vinci would make many attempts in a drawing to get a particular line right and the way open source software is improved by acknowledging problems and attempting to correct them. As well as parallels between software and art Graham discusses ways in which small start-ups can achieve significantly greater success than large multi-national software houses. if you are interested in thinking about the connections between art and software O'Reilly has handily placed Chapter Two online as a pdf file.

Following on this theme its also worth looking at Gabriel's proposal for a Masters of Fine Art in Software where he makes a very persuasive arguement for awarding what would be an MA in the UK rather than an MSc in Software Design.

In the second part of the lecture we considered the Template Method pattern in some detail. This caused a certain amount of confusion around the way it structures code in the superclass to call code in the subclasses, but I think everyone (no matter what their prefered language) was happy in the end.

Hopefully everyone is now reading happily ready for this weeks' lecture and will be able to discuss QWAN on Thursday having read “The Quality Without a Name” pp 33-43 & "The Bead Game, Rugs and Beauty" pp 71-95 from Gabriel's "Patterns of Software" (ibid).