Re: Design Patterns book

The understanding I have is that the SmallTalk Patterns book is so well
written that the SmallTalk knowledge
(or lack thereof) doesn't get in the way of understanding the authors
explanations. It's in my inbox of books.
Glad to see folks are reading may of the same things I've been through
recently.

Multilanguage exposure is good in artificial and natural languages for
making you aware of "metapatterns" or
arbitrary limits in any one language. Programming languages have so much
lineage to them that old times (folks
who started programming more than a decade ago) have seen many of the
options already, so new languages seldom
provide much additional insight; how they are used or the point being made
can still educate but the language per se
will seldom have that much "breakthrough" representation of problems or
algorithms.

That being said, learning more about SmallTalk could be compared with
learning Latin, it gives you the metaframeworks
that much of the other later languages have.

"panu" <panu@fcc.net_zerospam> wrote in message
news:5c-cnThQeJ_zzQejXTWcpA@fcc.net...
> Tom Plunket wrote:
>
> >You might find your skills in your languages will get better if
> >you try a new, different, language. The little Smalltalk that
> >I've screwed around with has made my understanding of 'advanced'
> >C++ way more solid.
> >
>
> I think the point can be made that if you study a
> design pattern in two - rather - different languages,
> this makes it easier to see the "pattern itself", apart
> from its implementation(s).
>
> But how much you can actually benefit from "understanding
> a given pattern better" is hard to say. Surely it helps,
> but as Bill said, reading some other book, learning
> something else, might help even more.
>
> -Panu Viljamaa
>