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22 - DEATH TO CASE STATEMENTS

Smalltalk Report, January, 1994

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 August 2010

Kent Beck
Affiliation:
First Class Software, Inc.
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Summary

There are two notable points to make about this paper. First, it is one of the first times Ward and I published any pattern-related material (we presented some stuff at OOPSLA 87 in Orlando, I in Norm Kerth's “Where Do Objects Come From” workshop, Ward on a panel). Second, it argues that the worst problem of reuse is one of communication, not technology or economics.

The paper started out life as a Tektronix technical report. Ward and I had the habit of writing up just about everything we did as a TR. After we had written this, I think we submitted it as a position paper for some conference or workshop. Somehow, JOOP got hold of a copy and contacted us about publishing it.

The paper can be summed up as: “We created two sets of abstractions. The first was communicated as literate source code. The second was communicated as patterns for its reuse. The first set of objects was misused; the second was used correctly. We conclude that the problem of reuse is one of effectively communicating the intent of the code.”

Hold on a sec.…

Before I finish bashing case statements, I'd like to return to the scene of an earlier crime, my perfidious assault on that bastion of Smalltalk orthodoxy, the ubiquitous accessor method. (Whew! That's a tenbuck sentence if I ever seen one.) I argued that the violation of encapsulation provided by accessor methods more than offset any benefit of inheritance reuse.

Type
Chapter
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Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
A Sorted Collection
, pp. 213 - 218
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1997

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  • DEATH TO CASE STATEMENTS
  • Kent Beck, First Class Software, Inc.
  • Book: Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574979.025
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  • DEATH TO CASE STATEMENTS
  • Kent Beck, First Class Software, Inc.
  • Book: Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574979.025
Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

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  • DEATH TO CASE STATEMENTS
  • Kent Beck, First Class Software, Inc.
  • Book: Kent Beck's Guide to Better Smalltalk
  • Online publication: 04 August 2010
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511574979.025
Available formats
×