How These Patterns Were Written

It may be appropriate to say a few words about how these patterns came to be.

After the OOPSLA meeting where we decided to try to create a humane pattern language for email progress was very slow---in fact almost non-existent. So in November 2001 several of us (JoshuaKerievsky, RichardGabriel & ?RonGoldman) met to see about moving things forwards.

We took the ideas we had for patterns---often just the pattern name---and tried to organize them in related groups. When we were done we had 47 possible patterns.

Since Dick was having good results writing a poem a day, we decided to lower our expectations and try to write a pattern a day---or at least several a week. The plan was to quickly try to flesh out our potential patterns. For each possible pattern we each would try to write up something and then later merge our different versions. Hence you will notice that some of the patterns are quite short and incomplete.

Over the next few months we made some good progress, writing several versions of most of our candidate patterns and adding some new ones to the mix. But then we ran out of steam. At OOPSLA 2002 WardCunningham offered to create a wiki for our proto-language & we thought that was a great idea. So what's on this wiki are our initial drafts.

The next step is to complete the unwritten patterns, merge the multiple drafts into more refined versions, add in new patterns that people think appropriate, and try to make the whole into an actual pattern language.

Please JoinUs in this. --- ?RonGoldman

 

Last edited December 18, 2002
Return to WelcomeVisitors