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I found a great quote in the comments of Diomidis Spinellis’ blog entry Rational Metaprogramming:’Problems worthy of attack prove their worth by fighting back’ — Piet Hein

That’s a great way to put it!

Rob’s discussing object models for baseball cards. He is evolving a design bit-by-bit.

My first question is what use cases do you want for your database of baseball cards? Searching real stats for the season? Or just searching for cards? To me, that changes the way I’d lay it out.

To play along, here is a primitive set of plain old Ruby objects to model what he has so far. I thought it might be interesting to contrast the two.

OK, well, I lied, it is a little different, because I went ahead and subclassed for the variant card type.

class Card
  attr_reader :year, :number
  
  def initialize(number, year)
    @number = number
    @year = year
  end
end

class PlayerCard < Card
  attr_reader :player
  
  def initialize(number, year, player)
    super(number, year)
    @player = player    
  end
end

class BattingLeadersCard < Card
  attr_reader :top_50_batting_players # this is a list of players
  
  def initialize(number, year, top_50_batting_players)
    super(number, year)
    @top_50_batting_players = top_50_batting_players
  end

  def top_3
	top_50_batting_players[0..2]
  end
end


class Player
  attr_reader :name, :team
  
  def initialize(name, team)
    @name = name
    @team = team    
  end
end

Fwd: How to Enjoy a Convention [Phil Agre]: “Think about this sociologically. You have a gathering of several
thousand people from one profession. Most of them work in middle of
nowhere places with two colleagues, one of whom they loathe. They spend
all year teaching the writings of other people (some of whom are their
heroes) to 19 year olds. Some of those heroes are walking around the
hotel. Of course they’re looking at the name tags.”

(Via Conference Presentation judo.)

(Via Bejerano Lab, Stanford University.)

Squeakland has a list put together by Alan Kay for his students that gives background on the ideas behind Smalltalk.

It looks like quite an interesting list.