Ivan

Martin Fowler - keynote (OOPSLA 2005)

I'm not actually going to write up Martin's keynote, because someone else has already done a much better job of it than I would have.

Instead, I want to try to tie together three sessions at OOPSLA.

On one panel Dave Ungar (one of the inventors of Self amongst other brilliant achievements) said something along the lines of "a breakthrough idea is one that challenges your most deeply held beliefs."

In Martin Fowler's keynote, near the end he mused "does good design even matter?" (not the sort of thing you often hear him say). I don't know if he'd been influenced by Dave Ungar's comment.

In another panel, Kent Beck mentioned some disapproval about Martin's remark.

It got me thinking - Kent Beck has popularised some ideas that were breakthrough ideas as far as I'm concerned - e.g. pair programming - I was sure I wouldn't like it - my deeply held belief was that I worked best by myself - now proven wrong. Test first development - I was sure you had to write the code first then test it, and more sophisticated TDD - I was sure test first development was (only) about testing before really doing TDD and finding out that it wasn't (See Dan North's article for a good treatment of this).

So - maybe, just maybe, Martin's off-the-cuff (and slightly off-the-wall) remark might turn into a breakthrough idea some day. Maybe what we currently think of as Good Design isn't really. It's certainly one of my most deeply held beliefs that Good Design matters a great deal.

However, the results of Scrapheap challenge have challenged my assumptions about what good design is. The best solutions were in some ways elegant and simple; I think you could say they were well designed - but they weren't what I would have thought "good design" would look like before the workshop.