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I spent the rest of the day yesterday listening to different talks about patterns. Most of them talked about what has happend since the GoF book (Design Patterns, 1995), and what they think will be the future of patterns.
The track started with a talk from Ralph Johnson (one of the Gang of Four). He gave us his personal take on the history of patterns up to today. After him, Dragos Marinescu from ThoughtWorks talked about the new book Pattern-Languages of Program Development volume 5, where a new collection of Pattern Languages will be published later this year.
Markus Völter then talked about Patterns in Modern Software, Klaus Marquardt talked about how to improve the usability of patterns, and finally Kevlin Henney and Frank Buschmann talked about their take on the past, present and future of patterns.
The main trend in the pattern community is the move of focus from single patterns to pattern languages (interconnected patterns). Kevlin and Frank will publish a new book in Frank’s series Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture, volume 5, later this year. In this book they will connect patterns from the GoF book, patterns from Fowlers EA Patterns book and other new pattern languages.
Those of you more interessted in patterns can check out the Hillside Group. They are the group that run the PLoP conferences.
To me patterns is a little bit off in my peripheral vision at the moment, especially when I’m still so geared up from the agile stuff on Sunday. I do however think that there are some ideas in the patterns movement that we should embrace in Statoil as well and start to use for better communication both internally and externally.