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Butcher, Baker or CandlestickMaker

Just for the fun, I wonder if LtU subscribers would like to entertain themselves by thinking about how the olde rhyme about "Butcher, Baker, CandlestickMaker" (BBCM) might map either to or from, say, a design pattern or software idiom (assuming these are not tautologous).

For want of not leading the proposal, I would prefer to refrain from providing the dozen or so examples (usecases in OO-speak) that I have thought of. However to seed the discussion (and hoping the ensuring discussion will generated other seeds) let's consider some hint words like "push", "pull", "factory", "interface", "implementation" and, well, too many leading words already.

So who's up to the game?

By Justin Johansson at 2009-04-24 14:43 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 3551 reads

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Since the rhyme begins "Rub-a-dub-dub, three men in a tub" ...

... it's obviously about heterogeneous containers, which Lisp programmers find so useful and everyone else (apparently) so abhorrent.

However, the oldest known version says "three maids in a tub", which suggests that it's about "three respectable townsfolk 'watching a dubious sideshow at a local fair'" (Wikipedia, quoting Iona and Peter Opie). I leave it up to the dubious imaginations of LtU members to explain how that maps onto a design pattern.

By johnwcowan at Fri, 2009-04-24 15:51 | login or register to post comments

Well, it doesn't map,

Well, it doesn't map, exactly, but it does sort of seem like the developer was setting up conditions for multiple instantiation...

By shap at Mon, 2009-04-27 23:29 | login or register to post comments