Younghoe.Info (final edition)

Fifteen years of Design Patternsn.
"Design Patterns" was released in October, 1994. In the years since, some of the patterns have turned out to be very important, some less important. New patterns have arisen that have displaced some of the older patterns.  There are common ways that the patterns are misused. Ralph Johnson will talk about what he has learned about the patterns since the book was published.

Ralph Johnson is one of four coauthors of "Design Patterns" and the leader of the group that built the first refactoring tool, the Smalltalk Refactoring Browser. He is currently working on patterns for parallel programming and for safe software, and on tools for refactoring systems to be more secure and to be more parallel. Ralph Johnson is a Research Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Keeping software young and limber
As software ages, it tends to get harder to change.  People try to make changes in such a way that nothing breaks, but it becomes harder and harder to change it successfully.  Eventually the software is so hard to change that it is abandoned.

Not all projects are like this.  Open source projects seem to run on and on.  Some commercial projects seem to last indefinitely, sometimes because they are so valuable that no effort to save them is too great, other times because the software stays flexible and so developers are able to adaptit to new situations.

There are a set of techniques that help keep software flexible and adaptable.  They are often named "refactoring", but there is a lot more to it than just a particular set of techniques for changing code.  Flexible code requires certain management practices, as well.  This talk will describe how to keep your software young and limber.