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Re: Design methodology in an OODL environment
On Thu, 21 Jun 2001 19:45:02 -0400 (EDT), shepherdofchaos@cs.com (Levi
Conley) wrote:
> I'm still in the very early learning stages with Dylan, but I thought
> I'd share some of the issues I've been thinking about. I've chosen a
> fairly ambitious learning project. I'm going to write a mostly
> text-oriented D&D style adventure game, using a DUIM GUI.
>
> What I'm imagining (hoping, in fact) that developing with
> Dylan will allow (encourage even) is a kind of jump right in the
> middle and code your way out approach, an iterative, spiralling
> development cycle, expanding and improving along the way without
> running into major roadblocks (beyond simple ignorance, which is easy
> to remedy). I've tried this approach in VB (& C) a few times, and the
> results weren't pretty. :)
>
> Can Dylan work this way, or am I being naive and asking for trouble?
It is possible to work this way in Dylan and other (serious) dynamic
languages like Common Lisp and Smalltalk, but it is always better if you
have a design first.
The Smalltalk community has pioneered refactoring, and Lisp has been
closely associate with R&D programming, especially AI, where 'discovering'
the design is one of the expected outcomes of the act of programming. You
just can't do that without a great deal of support for interactivity and
abstraction.
It isn't just about the language. You also need programming environments
that support this through "listeners" and source code navigation tools. Eg
a neat feature of Fun'Dev is its ability to create a virtual file of all
the methods for a generic function so that you can edit them all at once!
__Jason
References: