General talk about software patterns

["Mike Beedle" <beedlem AT e-architects.com>]

Mark wrote:
> In the commercial sector, it is hard to find Lisp or Smalltalk people. 
> Reimplementing in a more common language will, over time, reduce costs and

> make the progress of software development more predictable.

Mark:

All true.  But realize that if everyone had followed this maxim we would
still be programming in COBOL and assembler ... not in Java.  There was also
a time when "it didn't make business sense to program in Java" because Java
was used even less than Lisp, remember 1995, or even 1996?

I think the key is in finding how a language becomes "a more common
language", as you said.  My take on it is that there must be "powerful
marketing muscles" behind "business waves" that make some sense.

Mark wrote:
> In over 30 years, I have only been involved in one commercial project 
> that used lisp.

Sorry to hear that :)  Some of us are trying to change that.

Anyhow, I wanted to show the subscribers how some very simple code
implements a "pattern-oriented" way of programming and *why* that might be
appealing to programmers or businesses:

        * codify pattern knowledge in code (and prose)
        * very quickly create pattern instances and make them interact 
          with each other
        * constrain abstractions used in patterns to conform to a given
          pattern structure  (not shown in the code posted)
        etc.

- Mike