I think you missunderstood Nicolas's tone as bitter or beligerent. I'd say the tone was more a spritely "poking a dog with a stick" or a jester's humor. Personally I thought the comments were hilarious, but I can see how they could easily be missread. If you have a mental map of a rigorously patterned application next to one done in a language where the patterns are ingrained in the language, his statements become quite funny. I believe the real intent is to make fun of how verbose Java (and As2) are.
Here's an example (though not perfect). The iterator pattern, taken from the book, fills a dozen pages of description, half a dozen classes, each with 30 lines of code just to create the structure. Why? To iterate over two menus with a different underlying item types. In ML there is a function called Map that is built in to do this for you. You don't need to create half a dozen files for your interfaces, subtypes and instances, it's built into the style and structure of the language so that it's just not that verbose or complex. The same thing is going on, but in one language it's handled transparently and in the other you implement it with a verbose syntax and a pattern. Over and over you see this with Java and Java type patterns and in the end it becomes kind of funny, but only to those who have seen the comparable programs in different languages.
Anyway I didn't respond to be mr lecture bot. In fact I'd only be sure the analogy was correct if I were to write the code to show it, which I haven't done.
Which is why I was thinking that, rather than have individual groups in individual cities (in which case I would end up as a group of 1 again) It might be a decent exercise for the community as a whole to populate the osflash wiki with a section that implements the head start example programs in As1, As2, As3, Flexible, Lzx and an email list to discuss them (and how they relate to ARP would be nice as well). I think we'd all learn a bit about the various languages and how they could be both improved and used.
So would folk be interested in an Osflash Head Start study group?(And would it be ok legaly to re-implement the example programs in the various languages?)
It is a good book and I think a meaty enough topic to deserve a list of it's own. Of course it would really be about all patterns, but I think the Head Start book is a good starting point, because it really is not as booring as most pattern books.
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