Review: Elemental Design Patterns

Jason McC. Smith has jotted down a few clever words, not so much about design patterns as about Elemental Design Patterns. There is quite a difference. If you haven’t read the original Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by the now so famous Gang of Four (Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson, John Vlissides) you really should. Its an important book.

 

Elemental Design Patterns is an important book, too. It may, eventually, end up being just as famous and having even more influence on development of object oriented software. I hope it will.

 

What is it about? The GoF book was about abstractions that could be hard to recognize in software without knowing what to look for. And even then it could be hard if the software was not built from the ground up using Design Patterns. Jason McC. Smith realized this difficulty while building a system aimed at finding Design Patterns in software. He finally figured out that something more, ehm elemental, was needed. Hence, Elemental Design Patterns.

 

Elemental Design Patterns can be something as simple as a method call, but it is important to acknowledge that we are talking about concepts here. The patterns are language independent (although they obviously feel really at home in object oriented languages). The neat thing about these patterns are the fact that you can use them to reason about structure in software on a conceptual level and all the higher abstracted design patterns can be built from the elementals.

 

Elemental design can even be used to reason about refactoring of code, which is one of the reasons I predict it will have a great influence in the years to come.

 

I can’t say that I think the book is a light read. It is very well written, though, but if you are a stranger to sigma and rho-calculus (I am), you will likely gain something from reading Jason McC. Smiths dissertation about the subject. And you’ll probably like to read the most important reference: A Theory of Objects by Martín Abadi and Luca Cardelli.

 

I say: If you have the slightest interest in the theoretical foundation of software development you should read this book.