It's curious how some books, typically technical books, or what me might broadly call textbooks, often become best known by their authors' names, rather than their title. This is often becuase the titles are unweildy: who'd rather say ClientServerProgrammingWithJavaAndCorba? than say OrfarliAndHarkey??. But in the case of GoF, the title is pretty short anyway, so this looks like jargonism rather than utility. --KeithBraithwaite
I'm curious. Do you use "GoF" in spoken conversation too ? How do you pronounce it ? -- lb
I do use "GoF" in speech, and I know plenty of other folks who do, too. Don't you? I pronounce it, well... /gof/. That's with a hard g. Like "golf" without the "l" --KB
Well, most of my work conversations are in french. "Gang of four" has only a precarious hold on a tiny bit of that memespace, and "gof" is definitely out. I usually say "Design patterns", with an atrocious french accent of course, but people know which book I mean.
I'm not sure I can convey quite how it feels to be in the software business when you were brought up in the wrong language, and spend most of your work time with people who speak the wrong language. -- lb
''Memespace"!? Anyway, I've often wondered about the exact thing that that you mention, ever since I worked with some Russians. I'm particularly interested in the effect of having programming language keywords drawn from a language other than the programmer's first (or only) natural language. Frankly, for many Anglophones it's a hindrance to have to associate a new, and often quite pecular, meaning to a familiar word. Then again, perhaps the often rather strained connection between the everyday and technical senses of these words helps. I don't know. --KB
I can answer that one about the keywords. The problem is not the keywords in themselves. The problem is that if you write french method, variable and class names, it looks like french sprinkled all over with english. The other problem is that when management forces everyone to write code in english (because it's "more professional"), the best they can do is almost always french, badly translated word for word to english. I've seen horrors...
The real problem isn't code, though. It's the entire culture. Everything I know about design, projects, patterns, quality, testing, and so on, I learned about in english. Transposing this to a french culture always involves a slight friction. Not a big effort, mind you - but it's there. -- lb
Right. Our Anglo-Indian (and English speaking) team once ported a product written in C++ by German-speaking Germans. Even now the code still has smatterings of German variable names (in the most cryptic bits, the ones we ported syntactically, without trying to understand them), and it is quite jarring.
It has been claimed that XP would be a poor fit for French development culture, since (this was also part of the claim) XP belongs to some sort of Anglo-Saxon empiricist tradition, while French developers tend to be driven by a strong desire for formal correctness. It may be that your whole language community is being tarred with the same brush used on BertrandMeyer?...--KB
A great many technical books are surveys or representations of an established body of practice. Some books, independent of the title, present a unique, idiosyncratic, and compelling point of view. On the bookshelved site, we've mentioned books that mean exactly what the title says, but not in the way you think.
I suspect that a technical book becomes known by the author when it presents a unique, personal, and compelling addition to the field. Most authors have about one of these, then spend their time addressing subsequent problems with that particular hammer. When one of these works becomes canonical (within a narrow technical domain, for example) it often gets known by the author. The author's name is actually more descriptive. Not yet another early days programming language book but the definitive early reference on the C language - Kernigan and Richie, or K & R.
It also seems that identifying technical books by author is more common among people who were part of the current professional practice at the time the book came out. The object practitioners practicing when the GoF did their design patterns thing know the book as "GoF."
But that's just me. And nothing is known by my name because I haven't really had a big, compelling idea yet. - JamesBullock
Oh... So these young men with the banderillas, when they said they'd had a struggle with the bullock, they were not, in fact, referring to their studies in software development ? -- lb
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