One thing I was reminded of at ApacheCon was the design pattern where in you leave everything till the last possible moment. Lazy evaluation. It came up three times.
My favorite reminding was web sites that defer creating their content until the user requests it. The error handler then thrashes around till it finds a product manager, who then hires somebody to fill the demand. I see out sourcing.
Then there Doc Searles (“That’s URL with and S on each end.”) who got on about Magazine v.s. Vernacular architecture. I seem to have become less and less enthusiastic about ‘thick architectures’ for software. Though there is something pleasing about remembering that “The job of the architect is to bankrupt the builder.” Frank Lloyd Wright also said “Form follows Funding.”
The usual counter point to lazy evaluation is eager evaluation. Of course those aren’t the only two solutions to the universe of getting things done. Why there is planning, and managers (aka executive directors).
I also found out about Nagios, which has now replaced Big Sister at my house. Big sister kept giving false negatives.
Interesting to see lazy evaluation as a design pattern. I’ve always known it as an alternative to eager (e.g. imperative) evaluation – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lazy_evaluation .
Also please note that the image-code I had to fill in order to post this comment was obscured by your sidebar : the design doesn’t cope well with large font sizes. I’d recommend dropping the image-code down to the line below ‘Please enter this code:’.
Interesting interesting, I am from Germany and I am just writing a paper on this subject..