Larry O’Brien recently interviewed three of the Gang of Four about their seminal work on patterns, “Design Patterns 15 Years Later: An Interview with Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, and Ralph Johnson“.
Larry O’Brien: “Designing object-oriented software is hard,” are the first words of Design Patterns. Are those words still accurate?
Richard Helm: Software design is always hard. Although most modern development environments do lots to reduce complexity through reusable libraries and toolkits (Eclipse, Apple, Microsoft), designing a software solution to the business problem is still hard.
Ralph Johnson: Designing software is hard. That is what makes it so fun! People who are good at designing software enjoy solving hard problems, at bringing order to chaos, at overcoming difficulties. Things that used to be hard are now easy, but we have moved on to working on problems that would have been impossible 20 years ago. OO programming helps but does not eliminate the difficulty of design.
Quote:
If debugging is the process of removing bugs, Then programming must be the process of putting them in.
–Edsger Dijkstra


